


How to Make a Kitten Smile

by RainbowKittyPrincess (PrincessSmuttButt)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Adoption, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - High School, Anxiety, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Child Abuse, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Genderbending, Lesbians, Platonic Romance, Reform School, Russia, Suicide Attempt, Trans Male Character, Triggers, Yurio, foster mothers, i love women, more lesbians, yuri is my child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2018-11-13 05:23:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 20
Words: 56,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11177958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessSmuttButt/pseuds/RainbowKittyPrincess
Summary: Yuri Plisetsky, 15 years old and the recently adopted daughter of Victoria Nikiforov and Yuuri Katsuki, has a penchant for rage and rebellion. When her impulsiveness finally threatens to send her to jail, her mothers, doting and worried, decide to send her to an all-girls' reform school across the country. Yuri, now more alone than she's ever been, has to navigate these complicated halls and even more complicated people, while struggling with her self-inflicted loneliness. But when she meets Otabek, a girl with a dark past and kind eyes, Yuri starts to question whether she's really as incapable of love as she thinks.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for clicking on this story! 
> 
> Long rant ahead, I am sorry. 
> 
> ****TRIGGER WARNINGS**********
> 
> Let me put out some trigger warnings, first and foremost: 
> 
> There is some self-harm, alcohol abuse, one actual attempted suicide and discussions of suicide  
> There is also mention of attempted rape, child abuse in foster care, some sexism, and talk of anxiety.
> 
> Take care of yourself :) 
> 
> ********************************
> 
> So I think Yuri Plisetsky is such a fucking amazing character and I would never have forgiven myself if I didn't write this fic. He has so many layers, all the way from angry adolescent to lonely little baby. He's really, really special, and I found myself desperate to dig into him in a creative setting. 
> 
> I genderbent it all because, while I love Yuri On Ice and all the other male-centric anime I watch, I do get sick of the "male-centric" part. As a queer woman, I am much more inclined to put women (especially queer women) at the forefront of my works. Their stories don't get told nearly as much as men's, and as a woman myself I think I have the tools to depict queer women and girls in a multidimensional manner. That's why I genderbent it. If you look at my other stories (which I shamelessly hope that you do), almost all of them focus on male homosexual relationships. Which I love, obviously, but telling female stories is really important to me, as well. 
> 
> Also because who doesn't love boobs and lesbian sex?!?!?! 
> 
> One more note (kind of important, I guess?): this is a story about love, yes, and there will be plenty of Victuuri for you to enjoy, but more than that it's a story about friendship. If you're here for OtaYuri romance/sex, you've come to the wrong place. There are certainly places in the story in which you can interpret Otabek and Yuri's relationship to be more than just friends, and I invite you to do so if that's what you please, but the story is first and foremost about their friendship. People don't talk about platonic love enough, and when I found myself complaining about it, I just figured I should do it myself. :) 
> 
> Okay, long and rambly rant over, I hope you enjoy the story! 
> 
> It is 20 chapters long, and I'll try to update every 2-3 days. 
> 
> (to see the translations of the Russian, scroll over, but don't click on, the Russian words. disclaimers: I don't speak Russian. apologies for any mistakes made.)
> 
> xoxo

**1**

        She would put my head in her lap and stroke my hair, until my eyes drifted closed, and then she would sing to me. Her pitch was always a little bit off, and I told her that once, but she just gave me that smile—you’re saying something that doesn’t matter but I’m listening to you anyway. That smile. She didn’t care about the pitch, so I forced myself to stop caring, too. Her thighs would always warm my cheek, and they were soft, made for my head to be there. After the first time, I started comparing my pillows to her thighs and feel dissatisfied. She would put her palm against my head and avoid getting her fingers in my hair, because her nails were always long and pink and would get caught. Her hand would press against my scalp, gently, and run down the curve of my head in rhythmic movements that matched the lull of her voice.

        _Pussy, little kitty, kitty—little grey tail._

_Come to us and stay the night, to rock our little baby._

_I will pay you, little cat, for your job._

_I will give you a piece of cake and a jug of milk._

That one was my always my favorite. Her voice always sounded the sweetest then, and when she sang she would lower her head and the ends of her hair would brush against my temple. I’m not entirely sure how it started, how she had managed to convince me to put my head in her warm, soft lap and listen to her lilting voice like waves on the shores of rocky beaches. But it came to be a place of comfort to me, a place I could come to after the world had pushed me into a corner and forced me to bring my claws out. Usually, while I scratched people, I ended up scratching myself, too. Her lap helped my wounds heal faster, helped cool my pounding head, and I could let myself tremble there.

        _Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti,_

_The cat took a taxi._

_She paid a hundred rubles and went to the museum,_

_And the kitten clung on and rode for free._

Over and over while my tears dried and she tried not to get her fingers stuck in my hair. Sometimes I would open my eyes and glance up at her over my shoulder, just to catch a glimpse. Eyes like the surfaces of oceans beneath heavy lids would always gaze down at me, pink lips that kissed my head before I slept every night smiled down at me, hair escaping the cage behind her ear in some useless defiance. She would shake her head gently at me, What do you need? And without a word I would turn back, press my cheek against her lap, and let her continue singing to me.

 

* * *

 

        I made dinner, and told them to make sure the dog stayed out of the kitchen. Yes, I had no choice but to live with the dog, but I’d be damned if he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and looked up at me with those trust-me-I’m-innocent eyes. And I knew that one of them (at least) would feed him under the table anyway. As the food simmered, I heard sounds from the television drifting in from the living room, voices screaming in vulgar, brazen American English. When I looked over, I could see the tops of their heads over the back of the couch, leaning against each other. Probably not even watching. Then the dog showed up and sat down next to me, letting his tail bang against the floor like a foot tapping impatiently.

        “Goddamn it,” I muttered. Then screamed, loudly, “One of you good-for-nothing assholes, come get the dog!”

        “Just let him lick your fingers and he’ll go away,” one of them called back. It didn’t really matter which. Neither of them even turned to look back at me. With a roll of my eyes and a tingling feeling on my fingertips, I reached my hand out. The dog, smiling, leaped forward and licked my fingers. When he had completely covered my hand with saliva, he left. I washed my hands and then I almost burned the food, so I cursed under my breath before realizing that they didn’t give a shit if I cursed out loud. It was weird getting used to that.

 

* * *

 

        She introduced me to weird new music, because there were so many genres that she loved. There were these little black earbuds and, when we sat on the couch together staring at a blank television, she would reach over and offer me one. With a charade of annoyance I would grab it and put it in my ear, hoping that if there was any wax in there, she wouldn’t notice. The first time, she showed me The Smiths. I turned away and muttered something about how it was boring, when really, I was holding back tears. She started thinking about me when she heard certain songs, so she would gently grab my elbow and pull me to the couch and offer me the earbuds. It was always something different, always something she could bob her head to, smile stupidly to, hum when she was cleaning the house. There was a strange comfort in being able to recognize the songs that she was humming.

        I noticed that she was always beautiful when she listened to music. For one of my birthdays she got me a Spotify Premium subscription and made me some playlists. It took me a few weeks to figure out, which made me angry, but she was patient.

        Sometimes when we sat on the couch, sharing headphones and discovering ourselves through music, she would reach out and wrap her arms around me in unexpected embraces that, I’m sure, she spent minutes building the courage for. She would rub her cheek against mine and the friction was like invisible fire. I would feel her glasses shifting, and though I never once lifted my arms to hold her back, I always leaned against her because I liked the feeling of wanting to be held. Her misplaced affection made me too confused and comfortable to be angry at anything anymore.

 

* * *

 

        I got into a fight with a kid who pulled my hair and tried to flirt with me on my way home from school. Alone, I always walked alone, and I was listening to one of the playlists. Something with a lot of guitar, an intense beat, because I always liked to feel like I was a little more punk than I could afford to be. He showed up next to me and tugged on my hair, to get my attention. I glared at him, and he gestured toward his ear—take out your headphone. I took out only one and spat in his face when I asked him what he wanted, fists already clenched.

        “You should wear a shorter skirt tomorrow,” he smirked. Then, perhaps as a reaction to my furious expression, he added, “I bet your legs are way hot.”

        I punched him in the face before realizing that he was the son of a cop, and the guy who ran the supermarket we were standing outside of called the police as soon as my fist made contact. It wasn’t the first time he called the cops on me. For some reason shit happened outside his damn supermarket. My anger quite often got the best of me, but I never regretted it, because my anger was always something I found a way to justify.

        Victoria was the one who opened the door when the policeman knocked, gripping my arm in his excruciatingly harsh grip. I felt as if my arm were about to break in half, but when I had told him to let go of me, he had threatened to really break it with a gleam of such authority in his eyes that I had, in spite of myself, fallen silent.

        She opened the door, looked at me (though I avoided her eyes), then looked up at the policeman. I waited for the disappointment in her voice.

        “Excuse me, Officer,” she said smoothly.

        “Your girl’s been causing trou—”

        “If you don’t let go of her this instant, I will be forced to talk to your supervisor,” she interrupted. I whipped my head around to face her, eyes wide, only to see that there was a smile on her face and she was staring unflinchingly up at the policeman. As if her voice were magic, as if it struck superhuman fear into his heart, he dropped my arm. I fell flat onto my feet and rubbed the spot where he’d held me—there would be a bruise there. He cleared his throat and continued, but I was too astonished to savor his barefaced embarrassment.

        “Your girl’s been causing trouble,” he finished. For a moment her eyes flickered over to me, and I’m not sure if I shriveled or grew beneath her gaze. It was only for a moment, before she looked back at him.

        “It’s been, what, three times in the past month?” she replied. “Surely you must know her name by now.”

        His silence was almost as good as The Smiths, and in that silence, I loved her.

        “She...Yuri got into another fight,” he said, faltering, defeated.

        “Is that so?”

        She held her arm out, wiggled her fingers, so I moved to stand next to her in the doorway. The policeman nodded toward me, so I lifted up my fist to show her. My knuckles were scratched and bloody.

        “We’re gonna have to write her up,” the policeman said.

        “Yurotchka.” Victoria turned to me, ignoring him. “Why did you get into a fight?”

        “He pulled my hair and told me to wear a shorter skirt.”

        “Well.” She smiled at the policeman. “I would’ve punched him, too.”

        “Ms. Nikiforov—”

        “Victoria.”

        “Victoria, if this keeps happening, we can’t give her more warnings. Next time we’ll have to charge her.”

        “Tell the boy who harassed her that we won’t be afraid to file charges against him, too,” she replied.

        The policeman didn’t seem quite sure how to respond, so Victoria thanked him, told him to have a good day, pulled me inside, and shut the door in his face. I knew she was angry, so I didn’t say anything when she walked back into the house. By that time, she must have known that if she were going to yell at me, hell would break loose. I was grateful, but not grateful enough to hold back my temper, and I was much better at yelling. Which didn’t mean she didn’t terrify me.

        “Yurotchka,” she called when I didn’t follow.

        “What?” I called back.

        “Come and let me take care of those bloodied knuckles of yours.”

        I held my wrist and followed her. I seated myself on the kitchen counter while she got out disinfectant and gauze wrap, that terrifying smile still on her lips—not at all like the one I always saw when she sang for me. I must have been pouting.

        “Why do you look so grumpy, [котенок](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA)?” she purred. “You got yourself into this mess, after all.”

        “Like hell I did. What was I supposed to do? Curtsy?”

        “No. But I thought you would have learned by now that throwing punches doesn’t do you much good, Rocky.”

        “Made me feel pretty fucking good, actually.”

        She tightened the gauze just a little bit too much, and I sucked in a quick breath. Beneath a curtain of silver hair, her eyes lifted to look at me.

        “You know we’ll protect you as best we can,” she said, “but we can’t protect you from everything.”

        “I don’t need your protection.”

        There was no response to that. She’d finished with my hand, so she moved to the couch and pressed her palms down against her lap.

        “[Иди сюда](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%98%D0%B4%D0%B8%20%D1%81%D1%8E%D0%B4%D0%B0).”

        I went, lay down on the couch with my feet hanging over the edge, and put my head in her lap. And, like clockwork, she began to stroke my hair and sing softly. Sweetly, until I’d forgotten the humiliation I’d suffered beneath that stupid’s boy’s eyes.

        _Pussy, little kitty, kitty—little, grey tail._

_Come to us and stay the night, to rock our little baby._

_I will pay you, little cat, for your job._

_I will give you a piece of cake and a jug of milk._

We were used to it by that time, I guess. When Yuuri came home that day the two of them tried to talk to me, lecture me the way that normal parents might, but I shut them out. Gave them the same empty promise that I would fix myself and be better. Next time, I told them, I’d calmly look him in the face and tell him to fuck off.

        “I don’t know if that’s the best course of action, either,” Yuuri said. Always reasonable, always practical, always fixing her glasses when they didn’t need fixing.

        “Okay, I’ll just get down onto my knees and kiss his feet, then.”

        I knew that I made it hard for them to talk to me and teach me, but I didn’t want to lie to them and give them hope that I could be taught in the first place. Yuuri gave me one of her nervous, beautiful hugs, and I let her.

        “One of these days you’ll get hurt,” they both said.

        “Fine,” I replied.

        It was so strange—how long would it take them to lose hope in me? It was taking them longer than most. A few more months at most, I figured. It had already been a year. They wouldn’t be able to deal with me for much longer. They were both too hopeful, too optimistic, and I didn’t want to break their hearts but I knew that I would and I wanted to just get it the fuck over with.

        “Why don’t I walk you to and from school?” Victoria offered.

        “Sure. I don’t have any friends anyway.”

        They looked at each other. The way I always imagined worried parents might. Is that the way they thought of themselves?

        Before I went to bed that night, Yuuri made me another Spotify playlist and told me that it would help me sleep with some peace of mind. It was Drake and Frank Ocean, who I’d heard before but never really thought about. I lay down in my bed, curled up under the covers with a pillow to my chest and prayers that the dog wouldn’t invade my darkness today. Headphones in my ears, I listened to the playlist. She’d always been magical with her abilities to give me the right music at the right time—I almost called her back into my room so that we could listen together, because _fuck_ “Skyline To” was so good and I wanted her to hug me while I listened to it. But I bit my tongue and let my tears seep into the pillow, and somehow, it really did give me peace of mind. And what a weird feeling that was.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the Russian, again, just scroll over (but don't click on) the highlighted words for a translation!
> 
> xoxo

**2**

        Sometimes I would wake up really early in the morning, two or three or four, and go get a drink of water or sit on my computer—they’d bought it for me when I’d mentioned being good with computers—and let its blue light keep me up. And sometimes, when I’d drag myself on the cold soles of my feet to the kitchen, I would hear their tired, hushed voices through their bedroom door. Closed, obviously. A few times, in my melodramatic loneliness, I sat on the ground (nice beige carpet) with my back against the door, laptop open, and just listened. They always spoke in English, because Victoria wasn’t good at Japanese and Yuuri, though relatively better, wasn’t good at Russian. The way you always imagine lovers talking, voices hitched with affection, flowers in the spaces between their lips and fingernails, calm, patient, the color of wet roses, was the way they spoke to each other. They were loving in the daylight, too. Brushed hands and lips when they walked past each other in the kitchen. Left stupid post-it notes for each other on the fridge, the toaster, the microwave. I saw it, in the way they gazed across the room at one another with fluttering butterfly lashes while I stood between them. Love, in a pure form, the kind that almost nobody ever experiences ever. They were walking miracles.

        At night their voices would get quiet and they would get languid, and in the slowness I heard their love amplify. Once I heard them having sex—dirty, no, it’s making _love_ —and I fooled myself into feeling disgusted. But I listened anyway. Because a part of me was enviously obsessed with it. Heavy, pink-lipped kisses, orange candlelight breaths, honey-tipped tongues and feather pillow moans that shook me. Victoria’s voice got so much deeper when she moaned Yuuri’s name, and Yuuri’s laugh transformed into something so absurdly sensual. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of erotic, red-faced expression was on her so often nervous, bespectacled features when Victoria’s Russian tongue was between her thighs. On nights like this my fingers trembled, hovering above my worn keyboard, and whatever I was working on fell apart for a little bit.

        Tonight I heard them talking about me. My knuckles still hurt and the dog, thankfully, was in the room with them and not outside with me. I didn’t really mind the dog that much, he was just really needy and I wasn’t good at giving attention.

        I wasn’t surprised that they were talking about me. Somewhere in this town there was a kid recovering from a broken nose. They had talked about me before. When I’d first shown up, when I’d gotten into my first fight, when the cops had first arrived back in August and Victoria had lied and told them I didn’t even have a computer. What did surprise me was that they never sounded angry. Even tonight.

        “It’s not her fault,” Victoria said. “And I told the policeman, I told him.”

        “Of course it’s not. But you know how people are. They blame the angry one. The one with the bloody knuckles, not the one with the bloody nose.”

        “So tense, love. Relax.”

        “She’s angry for good reason, too,” Yuuri continued. Maybe getting a shoulder massage now. “It’s just not okay to act on that anger.”

        “No, I think it’s okay, but society says it’s not.”

        “Unfortunately, society’s the one in charge.”

        “So what do we do about it? I don’t want her to think that we don’t accept her just as she is. Because we do. Don’t we.”

        “Of course. But I’m worried about the police.”

        “You know what? Maybe we’re not there for her enough.”

        “How do we be there?”

        “I don’t know.”

        I heard Yuuri sigh and closed my laptop and hugged my knees to my chest. Victoria kept talking.

        “When was the last time she lashed out at you, Yuuri?”

        “Last weekend.”

        I had yelled at her for coming into my room without knocking. It was a stupid thing to lash out about, but I never lashed out at Yuuri for non-stupid reasons. And I did it often, because she was easy prey. She just took it—I couldn’t yell at Victoria like that. There was something in her eyes, something absent in Yuuri’s, that held me at bay. But Yuuri...her passivity was like an invitation. The first few times, I’d heard her crying in the bathroom and felt not even a pang of guilt. Now she would smile, fix her glasses, apologize, and tell me that if I needed anything she’d be in the other room. I, more often than not, sent her off with a middle finger.

        “She’s young. She’s figuring things out,” Victoria said.

        “What they call...teenage angst.”

        “Yuuri,” she laughed.

        “I just hope she believes us when we say that we only want what’s best. That we care.”

        “How could she? She’s been lied to so much.”

        I didn’t want to listen anymore. I dragged myself back to my room and dreamed about what it would be like to hack the Kremlin. If anybody would be smart enough or fucked up enough to actually catch me.  

 

* * *

 

        Maybe she signed off so easily in the first place because she’s Russian, too. One of those tall, graceful, cheekbones-that-cut-glass Russians, shaking the entire earth when she takes a single perfect step. When I first set eyes on her, her beauty infuriated me. Smiling down at me like some goddess, but it was so stupidly kind. And I was so shocked because when she opened her glossy lips to introduce herself, she did it in Russian. All I could do was stand and get lost in the silveriness of her hair—even though she couldn’t have been much older than thirty. She put her hand out but I just stared. Then her fingers curled like burning leaves and she kept smiling. A few weeks later I went home with her and she spoke more Russian to me in the car. I didn’t say much.

        I had hardly said a single word to her at that point and she was already calling me Yurotchka, which didn’t really annoy me as much as I thought it would. The nickname was nice, easy flowing off her tongue, and a very long time ago in Moscow someone may have called me that. From her accent I could tell she was from St. Petersburg. We carried my bags in (there weren’t many, and they were light) and she showed me my new room and said my hair was pretty. A sunflower, or the yellow part of a bumblebee, or a perfectly ripe banana. I may have told her to fuck off. Then she took me into her bedroom.

        “Yuuri’s out talking to a publicist. She’ll be back later,” she said. She’d already explained to me during one of our meetings that her wife was a writer. When she gestured for me to sit on the bed, even though my jeans were disgusting, her arm looked like a flower stem. I sat. The room wasn’t organized and pristine the way I was expecting, after seeing the way she dressed herself in flattering dresses and lint-free black shirts that hugged her figure. The bed wasn’t made, there were scattered piles of clothes in the corner, the closet was bursting and toiletries overran the toilette against the wall. Mostly makeup—and most, I was to learn, Victoria’s. Yuuri’s natural beauty just glowed so well, Victoria would say. And then Yuuri would blush and I would feel affectionate disgust.

        As I sat on the bed, furrowed brow and bitten lip, Victoria moved to a large, vintage-looking wooden cabinet in the corner of the room. Dust flew, I could see it, when she opened it, and over her curved shoulders I saw a hoarder’s paradise. All kinds of knick knacks piled on top of each other. She began sifting through it all. I watched silently; she mumbled to herself as her fingers worked through this weird, millions-of-years-old cabinet. I liked weird, though, so it intrigued me.

        “Aha!”

        She straightened up, closed the cabinet and locked away its treasures, then sat down next to me on the bed. Her smile was too wide, too bright, too genuine. In her hand she now held a small, sturdy, outrageously gorgeous _matryoshka_ doll. I saw it and my heart stopped, right there, in my tiny chest. I had to hold myself back from reaching out and grabbing it. The face painted there was serene and sagacious, waiting for me to ask any question because it surely had any answer. We were both staring at her.

        “My mother gave this to me when I was a little girl,” she said, still in Russian, “and my grandmother had given it to her. She used to tell me that this _babushka_ holds everything—every generation of strong, beautiful women in our family. Whenever you feel lost, she used to say, _babushka_ will remind you that you’re never alone.”

        Her eyes glistened, disappearing into the past, as she spoke. Maybe absentmindedly, she opened the doll and began playing with the smaller ones inside. The smallest was a little baby, with blonde hair and a stoic expression. Kinda like me.

        “Whenever I was struggling, as a young girl, an adolescent—like you,” here she looked up at me, “I told _babushka_ my problems. She’s a good listener.”

        I had the sudden urge to run my hands through her starlight hair. I didn’t.

        “I always dreamed of the day I could give her, this entire family, to my own daughter.”

        “I’m not your daughter,” I retorted. She held the doll out to me anyway.

        “No. Technically not,” she replied, “but I want you to have her. So that you know you’re really part of this family. We’ll treat you like we would our own daughter.”

        The doll was heavy in my hands, but looked natural there. I could’ve stared at her for years. Victoria hugged me and reminded me that this _babushka_ would help me. It was the first time I’d been hugged in a really long time, and it was the moment I knew I was going to break their hearts. They were then saddled with the burden of having to hug me back to normalcy.

        **“[Добро пожаловать домой, Юрочка](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%BE%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C%20%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B9%2C%20%D0%AE%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BA%D0%B0),” ** she said into my ear. 

          

* * *

 

        My knuckles were bruised and aching when I woke up the next morning. I’d only slept about two hours, and those two hours had consisted of a continuous reel of that boy flipping up my skirt. I had woken up angry and afraid, and Victoria had definitely noticed at the breakfast table. She had a way of knowing when I wanted to talk, when I didn’t want to talk, and she could tell at that moment that I wanted as little human interaction as possible. She must have. Because she let me just grab a banana, without a word, and blew me a kiss on my way out. I kept to myself at school—not a hard task, not when my reputation preceded me so well—but I could feel people looking at me. The few friends I’d had at the beginning of the year I’d managed to scare off, and who knows what kind of fucked up things they were saying about me. Nobody likes a lady with a temper. On my way home from school I flipped my hood up and let my hair fall in my face, because if people couldn’t really see my face they were much less likely to approach me. I’d done experiments before just to be certain.

        I opened the front door and walked in, and I could smell food cooking. Victoria’s car wasn’t in the driveway so I figured Yuuri had taken it upon herself to make dinner. I let my bag, heavy with books that I almost never opened, drop to the ground and took my shoes off from the back, with my toes, without even taking my hands out of my pockets. Footsteps light, I made my way through the entryway, to the dining room connected to the kitchen, and popped my head into the doorway. Yuuri’s back was to me, wearing a blue t-shirt and athletic black shorts that showed off her pale, toned legs. She was cooking on her tiptoes, even though she didn’t have to reach anything, and wasn’t short to begin with. It had been one of the ways she’d introduced herself to me.

        “Contrary to popular belief,” she had said, her English flawless and a coy look in her eyes, “not all Asians are short.”

        “And apparently, not all Russians are tall,” Victoria had added with a patronizing pat to my head. She had an accent, though, even heavier than mine.

        The music was playing from a small stereo, old-fashioned and unnecessary and one of Yuuri’s weird quirks. When she could, she listened on that stereo, and somewhere in the garage she claimed to have a gramophone hidden away. She promised me that she’d bring it out for me on my sixteenth birthday. I didn’t recognize the music, which amazed me—even after a year in this house, it seemed Yuuri never listened to the same thing twice. She was like my personal music finder, and she was good at it. I tapped my fist lightly against the wall. She turned over her shoulder and her face lit up like neon lights, even in the sunlight dripping in through the windows, when her dark round eyes fell on my face. The tips of her cheekbones were pink, and then I noticed the goblet of blood-red wine on the table next to her. Her short, raven-black hair sat on top of her shoulders and her goofy smile (I could only ever find that word to describe her smile) made my chest tight.

        “Yuri-chan,” she called. “Welcome home! How was school?”

        I shrugged and crossed my arms.

        “It was school,” I replied. “Same old, same old.”

        “Classes easy?”

        “I mean—”

        “You’re such a smart girl, I can’t imagine you’re having too much trouble.”

        She always looked at me like I was the most amazing person in the world, and it wasn’t really fair. I wondered what about me could possibly compel her to give me that blindly loving expression, what about me could possibly compel her eyes to glow like that and her teeth to reveal themselves so willingly. Probably strong and straight enough to bite a hole to the very core of the earth. My eyes were unkind, my lips curled downward, my skin calloused and my words even more calloused. I just couldn’t figure out what it was about me that made me deserve to see such a beautiful thing.

        “Your hand okay?” she asked. I clenched and unclenched my fist to show her that it was fine. “Good.”

        “What’s that music?”

        “I haven’t shown you Oh Wonder yet? Shame on me,” she said with a playful click of her tongue. The music was slow and smooth and pretty. Yuuri took another sip of wine, and suddenly I was thinking about her lips, pressing down on the glass, kissing Victoria and tasting like pinot noir.

        Yuuri reached her fingers toward me and wiggled them. I crossed my arms more tightly and shook my head. She tilted her head, raised her eyebrows, and wiggled them some more.

        “No,” I said.

        “Come here.”

        She lunged forward and pulled my hand.

        “H-hey!”

        Now she was holding both my hands and her fingers were warm and kind. I had never let her wipe my tears before, but I wondered what that would feel like. She swung my arms and moved her bare feet across the kitchen floor, moving her head back and forth until strands of her straight hair started sticking to her open lips.

        “I know you’re a good dancer,” she murmured while I resisted her movements. “I can tell by the way you walk.”

        Somehow I was charmed by that goofy smile, that drunk but still on beat dancing, the wine I smelled coming from her tongue and the way she pressed my fingers to hers. I let her move me. Stepped from side to side, weaving our way among the counters and tables, the pots and pans and wine goblets and rice cookers. She lifted her hand up and I spun beneath her arm, felt my hair slapping against my eyelashes.

        “Yes, Yuri-chan!”

        Her laugh filled the house and I couldn’t really hear the music anymore. We danced and danced until I forcefully pulled my hands away, said I needed to finish my homework, breathless as I was. She pinched my cheek and said that as soon as she was finished with dinner, she’d come help me.

        “I know math isn’t your strong suit,” she winked.

        “Oh, fuck you,” I replied. I went to my room to brush my hair and wash my face, because it was tangled and I was sweating and craving some wine.


	3. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scroll over Russian words for translation!

  **3**

I never asked them what it was like to love each other. I mean, I could see for myself what it was generally like, but I never dared ask them what it was like to _make_ love to each other. That phrase always baffled me, and the first time I heard it in English I thought it must have just been a strange cultural thing. Then I realized there were ways of saying it in Russian, too, and my astonishment just got worse. It didn’t make sense to me (and still doesn’t really) that two people can feel so connected, in mind and soul and body, that they actually create the love between them. When I felt the warmth of the fire sparkling between Victoria and Yuuri, when I touched my hand to their bedroom door and thought my palms were burning, I couldn’t convince myself that they were making it themselves. Wasn’t it already there? I mean, wasn’t it the thing that had let them live together like this in the first place? The thing that had connected them? Making love isn’t real. That’s what I always thought, and why every time Victoria used the phrase, sometimes even in Russian, I would cringe and try to get the bitter taste of intimacy off my tongue with sweet, foul language.

Part of the reason I never asked them about sex was so that they wouldn’t ask me, and I wouldn’t have to talk to them about it. I didn’t have to talk to them about boys, girls, whoever and whatever, and I wouldn’t ever have to admit to them that behind closed doors I would touch myself because at thirteen, I’d kissed a stupid boy in the young adult section of the school library and had been confused about the feeling. I’d gone home, snuck onto my drunken foster mother’s computer, and researched sex because I’d heard that was what came after kissing. That’s what the stupid boy had said to me. And then when I’d watched the videos and realized I couldn’t do that by myself, I had looked up how to do that, too. I never wanted Victoria and Yuuri to talk to me about that, never; I couldn’t even imagine what sorts of expressions they would make if I told them. Victoria would smile, knowingly, and Yuuri would probably hug me. I didn’t want the situation to play out.

I realized that they really did love each other, with more passion than I would ever understand, the first time I really lashed out at Yuuri. She was on the couch and the dog was stretched out on her lap, even though he was way too big, and she was stroking him in smooth rhythms. I learned later that the rhythms helped calm her down. She liked the feeling of his fur, familiar and soft, against her trembling palms. I walked inside and went straight for my room, but she called my name. It was before she’d started calling me Yuri-chan.

“Yuri. Come tell me about your day,” she said. Something earnest, full of yearning in her voice.

“I’d really rather not.”

“Please? I want to hear about it. You don’t have to go into too many details, just...you know. What are you learning?”

Something kept me from scurrying out of the room. I didn’t sit down, on the couch like she wanted me to, but I didn’t leave. My gaze flickered around the room like the flame of an almost-extinguished candle, and I crossed my arms and felt her gaze burning into me with its kindness and desperation to know me.

“World War I,” I replied.

“What about math? Victoria mentioned to me that at the parent-teacher conference, they were having concerns about your math.”

“Math is fine.”

“I can help you, you know. I’m not great at math—”

“Said the writer.”

“—but I can help. I can at least try.”

“No, thanks, Einstein.”

She smiled, maybe to feign amusement at my joke. She wasn’t fooling me.

“Well, how about you get a study group together? Working with friends can be helpful,” she offered. I made an overtly repulsed expression, my upper lip curling toward the tip of my nose.

“I don’t have any friends,” I hissed, “and even if I did, what makes you think I’d even want to work with them? Everybody, including me, is dumb.”

“You don’t have any friends?” Her face was so irritatingly concerned, and I knew she wasn’t faking and that’s what made it even worse. I hated her so much in that moment.

“I don’t want any.”

“That’s not healthy, Yuri.”

“Thanks, Doctor.”

“I’m serious. Do you...need to talk to somebody?”

“Like who?” I scoffed. But Yuuri’s concern didn’t wane, and the way that her eyebrows scrunched up together, and right on top of her nose her skin folded and looked like flower petals, fueled my rage.

“A school counselor? Maybe even a therapist?”

“I don’t need a shrink.”

“Yuri...you can talk to us. To me,” she insisted. Then she smiled. “I know what it’s like to feel anxious and, sometimes, depressed. Trust me. I’ve been through it. So if you need hel—”

“Just because you’re fucked up doesn’t mean I am, too, moron.”

That shut her up nice and easy. Before I could suffer through another smile, concerned word, kind voice, I went to my room and shut the door behind me.

I thought that would be the end of it but Victoria stormed into my room later that night and for a split second, I could’ve sworn I felt her open hand against my palm. But she didn’t slap me. She sat down on the bed next to me, looked me right in the eyes, then grabbed my chin and pressed her fingertips into my sunken cheeks. Her face wasn’t even angry. It was horrifyingly serene, and I saw myself drowning in her eyes.

“I don’t know what you’ve experienced in your life. And if I’m going to love you right, the way you’re meant to be loved, I’m going to find out,” she said. In Russian. “But if you think that a difficult past and some bubbled up teenage fury gives you an excuse to speak that way to Yuuri, you’re horribly mistaken.”

I forced my face into an expression of defiance, though I remained silent. She almost seemed amused by my outward resilience, but maybe she saw me breaking on the inside.

“I can tell you, right here and now, that there is nobody luckier than someone who gets to love Yuuri. And she’s already trying to love you. Don’t throw that away, and don’t think that because we’ve taken you into our family you can stomp all over us. If you speak like that to her again, I’ll—”

“What? Lock me in the basement? Beat me with a belt? I’ve seen it all, so bring it.”

She fell silent. The smile on her lips hadn’t so much as twitched. It was solid, icy, it sent chills through me and I tried to conjure up what magical spell Yuuri had put her under to make her like this.

“Yuuri is everything to me. And she’ll be everything to you. I promise,” Victoria said simply. “So start acting like it.”

In that moment I understood what true love was—that thing that existed on Victoria and Yuuri’s fingertips when they reached for each other—and I understood that I would never feel it. But a part of me, a strong part, wanted to try, so I decided to let myself be in that household.

 

* * *

 

Yuuri tried suggesting that I keep a journal, shrugging her shoulders as she filled the dog’s bowl.

“Writing always helps with my rage,” she said.

“What rage?” Victoria laughed, tapping her nails on the kitchen counter with one hand and sipping tea with the other. It was around ten pm and we always managed to fall into sleepy, nonchalant conversations that to me felt like much more.

“It helps with _any_ negative feeling, then,” Yuuri corrected.

“That’s because you’re a writer, love. Yurotchka might not feel the same.”

“Yuri-chan?”

“It makes my fingers hurt.”

“[Видеть](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%8C) **?** ”

“You can type on the computer,” Yuuri insisted.

“She’s trying to tell you that she doesn’t want to keep a journal,” Victoria said.

“What’s the point? I can’t even write essays without wanting to throw up. Why would I write of my own free will?”

Victoria laughed, and Yuuri looked a bit hurt as her profession was effectively shit on.

“Still, Yuuri might be on to something,” Victoria continued. “If you find something to fill your time, you might not punch so many boys and hack so many computers.”

“The boys deserved to be punched, and the school computers didn’t even have firewalls. They were asking to be hacked.”

The bowl was full, so the dog scurried over and began to eat. Yuuri pat his head and took her seat beside Victoria at the counter. They weren’t even touching, but they looked natural there. Pretty as a picture—no, prettier. No camera would be able to capture whatever it was that I saw when I looked at them from my seat on the countertop across from them. I swung my legs back and forth, let my heels brush the drawer handles and my hands grow cold from grasping the granite. Victoria handed Yuuri her cup, and she took a sip.

“Besides, what would I even do?”

“How about a sport?” Yuuri suggested.

“No,” I said instantaneously.

“Chess club?”

“Fucking hell, are you eighty?”

“I know.” Victoria straightened up. “You should keep video journals.”

“Video journals,” I parroted.

“Kind of like the traditional journals Yuuri was talking about. A way to talk about your feelings, vent, distract yourself, but you film yourself and you talk instead of writing it down.”

“That’s a good idea,” Yuuri murmured.

“What good would that do?”

“When there’s something bugging you that you don’t feel comfortable talking about, with us, I mean, you can say it to your webcam.”

“You don’t have to post it anywhere. It can be just for the sake of talking,” Yuuri added. “You’re brilliant, Victoria.”

“Go on.” She batted her eyelashes, dark with mascara.

“Get a room,” I gagged. I hardly had the heart to admit that the idea intrigued me. I always thought of myself as kind of pretty, so I wouldn’t mind seeing myself on camera, and the sound of my voice wasn’t horrible, either. If I could talk into a camera, maybe I didn’t really need a friend who understood me. I just needed myself. I decided to take their advice and that night, alone in my room while they fucked in theirs, I made my first video diary entry. I kept a lamp on, and positioned it so that the lighting was just right. Shadow and light balanced on my pale face and made my green eyes just a little bit greener. I let my hair fall across the face, the way it was wont to do naturally, and I sat cross-legged and comfy in my leopard-print sweater. Then I spoke, in Russian, for forty-five minutes straight before I realized that I hadn’t even stopped to talk a breath.

Still, I didn’t think the diary entries would help much with punching stupid boys who thought they were entitled to something and hacking computers. Those things were just too much fun.

 

* * *

 

On really nice days, they took me to the park near our house, because they noticed that I liked to take naps in the sun when I was afforded the luxury. I used to go by myself, but then Yuuri asked me where I was going and insisted on coming with me and it became a weirdly normal tradition for us to go to that park when the weather was nice. We’d bring the dog, and he’d run around while they threw a chewed up tennis ball for him. Little kids really liked him and his brown, curly fur and friendly smile. While the two of them played with the dog, the little kids, flirted with words sweetened by sun, I would curl up and let the warmth seep into my skin. I’d sleep, sometimes dreaming of optical illusions and tie-dye and rainbows, and sometimes dreamless. Victoria liked her hair to be played with, and she in turn liked to play with mine, so sometimes she would braid it and put flowers in it while Yuuri put flowers in hers.

I got up for school that morning. Let my hair fall in stringy yellow tendrils over my face before sticking a hat on, put on my winged eyeliner and black mascara and red liquid lipstick (for durability, obviously). Victoria had bought it for me for my fifteenth birthday, saying it would bring out my eyes, and it did. I liked to play Rihanna in the morning but I was a shit dancer so it was mostly for the pump up. When Yuuri had come in to wake me up, she’d opened the blinds and I’d noticed the sun pushing through the autumn clouds. I pulled out my phone, turned on the front camera, positioned it the way I’d spent hours training myself to, and took a selfie. I posted it on Instagram, praying that nobody at my high school would discover my account, partly because they didn’t deserve to see it, and partly because it would open an entire new bag of ammo for them. I walked out to the kitchen to the smell of coffee.

Yuuri was much more of a morning person than Victoria was. She looked as if she’d been awake for hours already, her light makeup finished and her clothes straightened and her smile serene. Victoria still had puffiness around her eyes, hair long and tangled and unbrushed, lips chapped in a wrinkled nightgown.

“Morning, Yuri-chan,” Yuuri said. I raised a hand in greeting and went to the fridge for milk. “How are you feeling?”

“Kinda shitty.”

“You didn’t sleep well?”

“No, I slept fine. I just don’t wanna go to school and deal with all those assholes,” I muttered. I sat down across from them with my bowl of cereal. Yuuri and Victoria looked at each other, and I strained to understand the secret silent language they used so often to communicate, but it was futile.

“How about we go to the park today?” Yuuri suggested.

“After school, you mean?”

“Instead of school,” Victoria answered. I blinked at them.

“You’re...asking me to play hookey,” I said slowly.

“Not like you haven’t done it before, [котенок](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA) **.** ”

“I feel like as adult figures you shouldn’t be enabling me,” I smirked.

“You’ve been having a rough time of it. Let’s just go relax for today. Give yourself some breathing room,” Yuuri said. I shrugged in an attempt to display nonchalance in the face of embarrassing ecstasy.

“Okay. Yeah. Let’s go to the park.”

The dog barked in agreement. 


	4. 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scroll over Russian for translation
> 
> quick warning: this chapter contains some homophobic content. not too overt, but there, so take care of yourself!

**4**

Victoria went out the door first, and I paused at the doorstep and turned over my shoulder. I saw Yuuri’s silhouette through the doorway to the kitchen. Victoria was already at the end of the driveway, holding the dog’s leash in her silken hands, but something kept me in that doorway. Head turned, waiting for Yuuri to follow with the grace she didn’t even know she had. From where I stood, I could hear the sound of liquid, being poured, and Yuuri’s back was to me. I still managed to see the bottle, empty now, before she tossed it into the bin we kept for recycling. She would do the recycling herself later, before Victoria could see the empty bottle. When she finally appeared behind me, she was holding a water bottle and smiling.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the water bottle. She kept smiling, and her head tilted, like it was heavy and needed to rest on her shoulder for a bit.

“Vitamin water,” she replied.

I scowled at her wordlessly, but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do about it yet, so I relented and we walked down the road to the park. She scurried forward and linked her arm through Victoria’s, her other hand grasping the water bottle. I glared at that water bottle, and I thought of the moments Yuuri had given me sips of wine. When I would walk into the kitchen and see her taking sips from a little wine goblet and left pink lip gloss marks, the lip gloss that Victoria insisted she wear to keep her lips healthy, on the edge of the glass. She would beckon me with sneaky gestures until I was close enough that she could wrap her arm around my shoulder and we curled over the glass of wine and she would say, “Just one sip. Don’t tell Victoria.” When I would scrunch my face in distaste, she would laugh and pinch my cheek and reassure me that one day, I’d acquire the taste for wine.

I walked with my hands in my pockets. The sun was out but the air was crisp, kissing my skin with chilled breezes. The dog was excited, but he was a good dog. And he was old and experienced. He knew not to pull on the leash, knew not to make trouble for Victoria—who had had him for much longer than either Yuuri or me had known him. He was nice to the people who passed by and he loved pats and he would look with pleading eyes at the children who walked by because he wanted to make them happy, and usually, petting him made them happy. It had really confused him when I’d arrived and petting him hadn’t resulted in any evident happiness. I did like his smile, though. And the roundness of his eyes. They seemed absurdly round, like not even the sun could be as round as those black glass marbles.

It was easy to walk him and I did it sometimes when nobody else was home. He liked me, passively, just the same way that I liked him.

The park wasn’t too crowded. We found a good place to put our blanket out, where the sun was shining, and I fell upon it and let my limbs fall where they would. Stretched out, while blades of grass licked at my skin. The ground shook a little when Yuuri and Victoria sat down, took off the dog’s leash, and let him run around. Though I kept my eyes on the ground, my cheek pressed to the blanket, I saw the shadow of Victoria’s arm throwing the tennis ball for the dog to catch and bring back. I also saw the shadow of the water bottle moving up to Yuuri’s lips. What would happen if I reached up and grabbed it and emptied it into the grass? The grass would die and Yuuri would be upset and Victoria would get angry and petty, because that’s how she was. I turned so that I was facing the sky, in all its blueness. I took out my phone and snapped another picture, because my hair looked wild and beautiful.

“Victoria, come here a second,” I said. She responded instantly, the way she always did. I told her to put her face right above mine, and I squinted a bit.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m trying to compare your eyes to the sky. Like, how blue they are,” I replied.

“And your verdict?”

“I think today your eyes are a little less blue. Kinda grey.”

“Nasty little girl,” she teased.

“Shut up, [баба](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%B0) **,** ” I spat back. She pinched my nose, until I shook my head and she smiled and suddenly I wanted her to kiss my forehead. The sun was making me sleepy, so I turned onto my side, so I could see the two of them next to me, and then I closed my eyes with that image behind my eyelids. I listened to the birds, the wind, the incoherent voices of the strangers surrounding us.

I’m not sure how long I slept, but it was a weird nap. My body was spinning, my head swirling and twisting and my thoughts distorting into strange, dark images that I couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. There was colorlessness, a saturated pool of negative emotions, rage, sadness, as if the sun had never even existed to begin with. It couldn’t penetrate my mind and bring light to my dreams, couldn’t give me this one moment of peace.

When I woke up, it was because Yuuri and Victoria were practically on top of each other, crying with laughter. I blinked, went to rub my eyes until I remembered the eyeliner, blinked again, and sat myself up on my elbow.

“The hell?” I grumbled.

“Oh, Yurotchka, we’re sorry,” Victoria breathed through her laughter. I made a note to sneak into her bathroom later and see what kind of product she used to get her hair to look like that. “Apparently, Yuuri doesn’t know her own strength.”

Yuuri pointed toward a tree springing up near our little nap spot. The dog was sitting at its base, staring up at the branches, wagging his tail patiently. I followed his gaze upward until I saw the little speck of green among the orange, brown, and red leaves.

“Poor Makkachin,” Yuuri gasped, wiping tears from the corner of her eyes. “If only he could climb trees.”

They fell into another fit of loud, bold laughter, and I couldn’t understand how this was so funny that they were laughing this damn hard. It must have been part of that love thing I could never understand. They shared secrets, emotions, entire lives through their laughs.

“You guys are so annoying,” I mumbled.

“Yurotchka, do us a favor and grab it, won’t you?”

“Me? Why me? Pork cutlet over there is the one who got it stuck in the first place.”

Her favorite meal was pork cutlet bowl, and she made it at least once a week, and I didn’t like calling her Yuuri because I didn’t know Japanese and couldn’t get the pronunciation well enough to make it sound different from my name.

“I mean, Yuuri could do it,” Victoria began, “but I just figured you were a better climber.”

Her stupid, obvious plan worked. I sat up, flashed them a middle finger, stood, dusted myself off, and made my way to the tree. When I glanced back, Yuuri’s head was in Victoria’s lap—the same spot I always put mine when she sang to me—and the water bottle was half empty. Victoria’s lips were pressed down against Yuuri’s temple and the perfection of it all made me fear for a moment that I was going to cry.

“Sorry they’re so dumb,” I said to the dog when I was standing beside him. He just looked up at me, tongue lolling. I pet his head and started to climb. I leaped up, grasped the nearest branch, and pulled myself. My hair started sticking to my lips, so I used the hairtie on my wrist to tie it back. I only had to pull myself up one more time to reach the ball—Yuuri’s arm wasn’t so strong that she could’ve thrown it much higher than that. Below me, I heard the dog bark, and I felt like I was doing something really good. Someone was relying on me and I was actually doing something good. I grabbed the tennis ball and held it up so that the dog could see it. He barked again. I threw it back toward our blanket, and he jumped and grabbed it in his mouth and ran into Victoria’s open arms.

“Our hero!” she called out to me.

“Bite me!” I called back. She blew me a kiss.

I stayed in the tree for a little bit longer. I could see more of the park, more of the people, more of the dogs and the children and the strangers. I swung my legs back and forth and calculated how long they’d have to be for my toes to touch the ground. If I jumped, maybe I’d be able to fly. Spread my arms out, encase the entire world, reach my fingers toward opposite ends of the universe. I didn’t try it. As I was about to climb back down, I heard my name.

“Yuri Plisetsky.”

My full name, horribly butchered. I looked down and saw the boy with the broken nose staring up at me. I squeezed my legs together more tightly and narrowed my eyes.

“What?”

“You should be rotting in jail,” he called up, and pointed to his bandaged nose.

“And you should go fuck yourself.”

“Pretty good English for a foreigner,” he snickered.

“Shut up, Yank.”

“You weren’t at school today.”

“I just can’t stand to see your ugly face.”

“Fucking bitch.”

“Say that again, bitch!”

I made to come down, and he flinched, so I stayed where I was. Maybe he saw my gaze flicker over to Yuuri and Victoria, watching me with concern, because he turned his attacks on them.

“Those your fake moms?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“They are, aren’t they? I heard lesbians are shit parents, so it’s no wonder you’re so fucked up.”

“They’re not shit parents,” I replied bluntly. I decided not to say anything about his parents, because one of them was a cop.

“Then you must be fucked up naturally.” He glanced over at them. Victoria was standing up. “Hard to believe, though. Dad says they’re both weirdos.”

Victoria should’ve gotten there earlier. I hopped down, grabbed his lapel with both hands, whirled him around and pressed his back against the tree. My lips, covering clenched teeth and a tense jaw, came right in front of his chin so I could feel the hitches in his frightened breaths.

“Say whatever the hell you want about me, but I swear to god if I ever hear you say anything about them again—”

“Yuri.”

Before I could say or do anything else, Victoria forcefully pulled me away, and her fingers dug hard into my arm.

“Mommy coming to save you?” he taunted. But I saw fear in the trembling of his smile. I lunged again, but Victoria pulled me back.

“We’re going home. Now.”

My anger was getting the best of me. Red flowed into my vision like food dye and I struggled to even my breathing, and every muscle was burning. I pulled my arm out of Victoria’s grasp.

“Fine.”

Yuuri had already finished gathering our things, had put the dog back onto his leash, and smoothed my hair as we walked back home.

 

* * *

 

They came into my room sometimes if they heard me crying. Yuuri once told me that when she hugged me, it was more for her than for me—Victoria had spoiled her, she said, with hugs, and now she felt empty without them. When they hugged me together, and I couldn’t breathe, there was nowhere safer in the entire world. I hated them, I hated them with every fiber of my being, because they were letting me break their hearts.

They burst into my room without knocking while I sobbed, and they pulled me up so they could hug me, and Victoria kissed my forehead and Yuuri murmured into my ear. It’s okay, it’ll all work out, we’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, we love you, you know that, right? The dog joined us on the bed and I wasn’t even annoyed that I would have to clean the sheets later.

I recorded another video diary. I brought _babushka_ and put her on my computer so that I could speak to her. I told her about Yuuri’s water bottle, Victoria’s blue eyes and steely grip, the dog’s round eyes and the boy with the broken nose. In the middle of the video I realized my lipstick was still on, so I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

As I spoke, my discontent grew. I wanted the boy to have so much more than a broken nose. Anyone as horrible as that only deserved horrible things, that’s what I said to _babushka_ , and she looked at me with her approving eyes. And I told her I knew what that made me. Good people don’t wish bad things on bad people. Good people wish good things on everyone.

“I’m a bad person, too,” I told her. “But I want him to suffer so badly.”

* * *

 

When he went to lunch I used a bobby pin, a really big one that Victoria used sometimes at parties, to get into his locker. I opened his computer and recorded his IP address. I closed it, put it right back in its place, closed the locker, and went to eat lunch by myself in the corner of the cafeteria. The school was big, and there were never empty tables, so I usually sat at the table with a group of girls who seemed nice enough, were vain, like me, but they never so much as glanced at me, so I didn’t bother talking to them. I sat by myself with my headphones in, on my computer, listening to the music that Yuuri showed me.

 

* * *

 

Victoria’s best friend was a woman who worked with her, taller, darker, dramatic but not quite as dramatic as Victoria. She was fashionable and intensely vain, and her eyes were greener than mine and she always kept her hair sunflower-honey two-toned. Her name was Chris and when she came over there was no duo more annoying. I didn’t mind her all that much. She was nice to me, her antics were amusing, and she always insisted on flirting with Yuuri just to make her uncomfortable. Her sexuality was overt, in the ways she stroked their cheeks and threw winks and made every conversation into some sort of inappropriate sexual euphemism. She had a long history with Victoria, and when I showed up in that house, she was surprised and intrigued. We didn’t interact much, though. I would sit on the couch and play on my phone, and once she noticed my cat-themed phone case and offered me the Instagram profile of her cat. I followed immediately.

Chris translated French and Italian, and Victoria translated Russian. She loved Tolstoy, which I told her was cliché.

I told Chris I didn’t like to read much, but she brought me some books as a gift at the start of my sophomore year, anyway. She had translated them into English from French, and then Victoria had translated them into Russian for me.

“I can read English just fine,” I accused.

“I know. But Russian is better,” she winked. I couldn’t argue with that.

 

* * *

 

I didn’t watch the entire video myself. I just hacked the webcam using the IP address, let it record for a day, and found what I was looking for. I only needed to see the first two minutes. I probably would have puked if I’d seen the rest.

I posted it online and sent it out from an anonymous email address to the entire school. He wasn’t at school for a full week after that, and everybody was talking about it and I snickered, alone, at my handiwork.

The police showed up at our house the next weekend, and before they’d even gotten out the handcuffs I held out my hands and started apologizing to Yuuri and Victoria. 


	5. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scroll over Russian for translation!

**5**

I don’t remember if there was ever a trigger for my anger. A part of me felt that I’d always been angry, naturally defiant, with meaningless resistance etched into my bones and solidified by the way the world blew on me. When I was younger, I’d gone on a school field trip to one of those pilgrim towns, where they hire people to reenact the way we lived way back when. While the rest of the class had scattered, I’d stood, endlessly, watching the glassblowers. I was that glass, stuck on the end of the blowpipe, being molded into whatever the glassblower wanted me to be. But I twisted and turned in ways he hadn’t been expecting, for whatever reason, and when I’d cooled and become solid I was fated to be distorted and colorful like that forever. I had been so mesmerized.

Little things set off my temper and made me difficult to deal with, even with myself. I always felt ready to explode, my tongue eager to whip out of my red lips with flames on its tip to throw at somebody. I was competitive and immature, and I always had been, and whatever people wanted from me I resisted whether I wanted to or not. I was desperate to glorify myself into the same type of vigilante I saw in movies and on television, the one that breaks the rules but ends up saving the world, and that desperation continued even in the face of the way society worked. Vigilantes are never treated like that, even if they fuck up someone really fucked up. So I guess I decided that society at its very roots was fucked up, that if I couldn’t be angry and defiant and mean and loved at the same time, the problem was with everyone else. Not me. Somewhere along the line I managed to fool myself into believing that I was the only right one. People didn’t know what they were missing.

The whole common denominator of all my failed relationships thing was lost on me.   

After I vandalized the girls’ bathroom at my first high school with red graffiti, a high school guidance counselor told me it was angst and rage building up inside me, and that it was a normal thing for a fourteen year-old. What wasn’t normal, she continued, was taking out my anger in such unhealthy ways. I spat back that maybe I didn’t wanna play by her rules of what healthy is and isn’t, and that that would kind of defeat the purpose of teenage rebellion in the first place.

“Who hurt you?” she asked. When I saw the look of bewilderment in her eyes, I realized that it wasn’t one of the questions she was trained to ask. It had come straight from her pure, at-a-loss heart.

“Me,” I replied. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt the urge to make somebody cry for trying to help me. And it was always directed at the kindest people, too. The ones who feel parental affection for everyone, who want to adopt stray dogs and give to charity and work at soup kitchens on the weekends, the ones who are convinced that if they sacrifice some of their time and energy and boatloads of money they’ll make a difference in the world. The ones with the souls never tarnished, the ones who’d never heard a single insult in their entire lives and were therefore convinced they had truly done no wrong. Those were the ones I wanted to make cry.

At some point in my life, I had actually believed Yuuri was one of those people.

I turned out to be really wrong about that, but it didn’t stop me from making her cry, at least at the beginning. I only started feeling bad about it when I realized her kindness ran much deeper, that she’d had plenty of people spit in her face, that her love really was love and not something fake and disgusting and ugly when you look deep down.

Victoria was a different story entirely. I’d looked into her eyes and known that she’d never cry because of me, even if I did end up breaking her heart.

I’d ravaged the ones before them. They’d been that terrible type, like the high school guidance counselor (and the middle school guidance counselors before her) who believed that with a few kind words and gentle eyes they’d be able to cure me. But when I’d shown them the anger inside me, threatening to blow out of my sharp-mouthed volcano and bury them alive, they’d crumbled beneath the pressure. The charity they’d given before, of the kind that homeless people pretended to appreciate despite feeling patronized—what did they care, they had another meal for the day, they didn’t have the luxury of judging people on deeper levels, but fucked if I don’t believe they would if they could—wasn’t enough to fool me into believing that they were good people. So I’d made them cry, shattered their hearts deliberately, until they’d given me up the way I’d always expected them to. Not even the piroshkies I made were enough to make them keep me around.

The reason I loved those two is because their love was stupid and real.

They helped me discover that whether I loved someone didn’t actually matter, because fucking up was written in my fate. The defiance, the one etched in my bones, would lead me astray no matter what.

But, fuck me, I really tried.

 

* * *

 

At first, the officers lectured me, and tried to figure out how I’d done it. They learned quickly that guilt tripping didn’t work on me—then they learned that threats didn’t, either, especially when Victoria, sitting next to me in the interrogation room, said she would sue them if they continued with their completely unacceptable intimidation tactics. I sat in the uncomfortable metal chair, hands in my lap, hair falling in my face, and stared straight into their eyes as they let the accusations and threats and, eventually, insults roll from their tongues. Punk, attention-seeker, vandal, good-for-nothing screw-up. That one, that last one, was the final straw for Victoria. She slammed her hands on the table and stood up. She made even me jump, and the officer looked terrified. Her hair fell over her shoulders and hovered over the table.

“If you don’t charge her with something this instant I will call your supervisor and report you for misconduct. And if you say another word like that to her, I’ll have you sued for all your worth,” she said.

So, they charged me with unlawful computer hacking. A class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in prison. For adults, I mean. I didn’t know how it would work for minors. On the way to holding, the policeman whispered in my ear menacingly that the kid might file a lawsuit, too. I spat in his face, so he tightened the handcuffs. I heard Victoria and Yuuri shouting behind me that they would get me out soon, that they would make some calls, that it would all be all right. Then I heard Victoria cursing in Russian while Yuuri, flustered and quick of breath, tried in vain to calm her.

* * *

 

A lawyer came to see me the next day. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a flowing mane of brown hair tied back into a ponytail. I’d never seen anybody with a jaw as square as his, or a smile as blindingly white. It almost shimmered when he sat across from me, nicely-tailored suit and briefcase and all, and reached out to shake my hand.

“Call me Celestino,” he said as my tiny hand fit in his. “I’ll be your lawyer for these proceedings.”

“Great. They’re probably paying you a shit-ton, huh?”

“Pro bono,” he grinned with a wink. “I’m an old friend of Yuuri’s.”

“My lucky day.”

Celestino told me, his explanations broken with loud laughter and cheesy grins, that because I was a minor I could get lesser sentencing. He was straight with me, though. He said it was possible that I’d be sentenced to prison time in a juvenile delinquent center.

“Your crime isn’t so bad that you’d be tried as an adult,” he clarified, “but there are juvenile delinquent centers I bet the police are eager to send you to.”

“I can handle that,” I lied.

I asked him about the lawsuit. He told me that, unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about that until the boy with the broken nose actually decided to file the lawsuit. Though, he reassured me that it was actually pretty unlikely he would file. It would draw more attention to him, to the video, and he’d been embarrassed enough and should feel that the court’s punitive measures against me were enough. I smirked, thinking about how awful I looked in orange.

The courts were quick about it. They took me to see the judge the next day, and when I walked into the courtroom Victoria and Yuuri were sitting in the gallery. They stood up anxiously, arms intertwined, worry written in the wrinkles on their foreheads. I shrugged and rolled my eyes, to give them some sense that I hadn’t changed. To put on a façade, just for them, that I wasn’t afraid in the slightest. That I wasn’t imagining the horrible things that would happen to me in a juvenile delinquent center, the way I’d just destroyed my future over a stupid little video, the fact that for the first time I was thinking about how happy I was in that house with them. No, that’s wrong. I wasn’t happy. But I was getting there. Maybe. They, at the very least, gave me a bed and food and love and they didn’t care if I reciprocated, and that was enough.

“Did you hack this boy’s computer, Ms. Plitetsky?” the judge asked. The words formed in gobbles of spittle on his lips.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“You did so intentionally?”

“Obviously, Your Honor.”

“And you distributed this...video?”

“Yeah.”

Celestino nudged me.

“Your Honor,” I added.

“So you’re pleading guilty?” he finally said. His eyes were dead.

“Yup. Your Honor,” I sighed. He paused, looking me over, and I felt violated.

“How old are you, Ms. Plitetsky?”

“Plisetsky,” I replied.

“I’m sorry?”

“Pli-set-sky. That’s how it’s pronounced. Your Honor.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but Celestino interrupted.

“She’s fifteen,” he said hastily.

“Fifteen,” he grumbled. “You’re just a girl.”

“So they tell me,” I murmured. It earned me another of Celestino’s anxious nudges.

“Well, Ms. Plitetsky,” he continued, “I’m hesitant to send you to a juvenile delinquent center, despite your...colorful record. But I do believe some sort of rehabilitation is in order. I find you unfit to remain among adolescents your age in your current state.”

I visibly cringed. I turned back, just to see their faces. The judge’s words had stunned them into shocked, appalled silence. I swallowed back my tears and turned to face my judge once more.

“I’ll give you two options. Either I send you to the juvenile delinquent center here in the city, for three months.”

“Three months? [Ты спятил](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%A2%D1%8B%20%D1%81%D0%BF%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BB)?” Victoria cried. The judge glared at her, and Yuuri shushed her, and the break was enough to remind me to breathe.

“Or,” he said slowly, “I can send you to a reform school until you turn eighteen. It won’t go permanently on your record.”

“Reform school,” I echoed.

“We’re fine with either option, Your Honor,” the sleazy prosecutor said.  

Celestino put his arm around my shoulder and bent down, so when he whispered I was the only one who could hear him.

“The fuck is a reform school?” I hissed.

“It’s like...a rehabilitation center for students with ‘bad streaks.’ It’s meant to educate you and rehabilitate you well enough that when you’re an adult, you can go back into society without anymore issues. Usually much more effective and much more pleasant than a juvenile delinquent center, but you’ll be there for the long haul. The next two and a half years, at least. Until you turn eighteen.”

My heart dropped a little bit. A juvenile delinquent center would definitely destroy me, from the inside out, but a reform school would steal me away from the one place with the potential to be my home. I looked back at them. Yuuri was holding back tears now, while Victoria seethed. I did both. The walls of this shitty courtroom were closing in on me, suffocating me with scratched wood and peeling plaster and that useless American flag.

“How’s that sound?” he whispered.

“Fine. Sure. If it keeps me out of jail, sure.”

We straightened back up and I took a deep breath.

“I will find a reform school appropriate for her, Your Honor.”

“See to it then. You have a week before she must be enrolled. Court is adjourned.”

He lifted his gavel, and then paused, and looked me in the eyes. His lids were heavy and made his eyes look like they were sliced right in half.

“If I see you in my courtroom again, Ms. Plitetsky, I’ll send you to prison. You hear?”

“Whatever.”

A nudge.

“Whatever, Your Honor.”

“Court is adjourned.”

 

* * *

 

While Yuuri and Celestino sat in the kitchen, discussing the details of my damned future in hushed tones, I lay on the couch with my head in Victoria’s lap. She stroked my hair, sang to me in that low, sweet voice, as if she could feel the anvil thumps of my heart and knew how to calm it. My tears sank into her thighs, while her manicured nails hovered above my mascara-less eyelashes and wiped the wet corners.  

_Pussy, little kitty, kitty—little, grey tail._

_Come to us and stay the night, to rock our little baby._

_I will pay you, little cat, for your job._

_I will give you a piece of cake and a jug of milk._

I was amazed that they hadn’t yelled at me. Hadn’t lectured me about what a horrible thing I’d done, what a terrible abuse of power and talent, what a waste of a brilliant (but terribly fucked up) mind. They had just hugged me and fought for me. Harder than I’d fought for myself. My breathing caught in my throat, and my teeth scraped the fabric of Victoria’s skirt, and she leaned down and kissed my temple. The way I’d imagined her doing at the park.

“[Дыши, котенок,](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%94%D1%8B%D1%88%D0%B8%2C%20%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA%2C)” she murmured.

“[Я не могу](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%AF%20%D0%BD%D0%B5%20%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%83) **,** ” I replied.

She smiled and continued to sing. The Russian soothed me. I was craving piroshkies. I closed my eyes and listened to her voice in the darkness, swimming in images of the boy with the broken nose and the smug look on his face. My knuckles ached.

 

* * *

 

There was a picture on Victoria’s nightstand, of her, looking youthful, with an older man. The man had gray hair and a stern look on his face, no smile, but his arm was around Victoria’s shoulder in a protective way. Dressed austerely, too, in a black scarf and black trench coat and raven eyelashes. I’d asked Victoria about the photo once.

“His name is Yakov. An old schoolteacher of mine,” she’d said.

“Must’ve been a good one if he taught the likes of you,” I’d snorted.

Victoria hadn’t said anything about that, and her smile gave away nothing. I’d always felt a strange desire to meet that man, with the stern look and protective arm. I wanted to know what kind of schoolteacher it had taken to control a wild spirit like Victoria’s.

 

* * *

 

“Middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Two hours from Boston,” Victoria said. I could hardly hear her, because I was falling asleep in her lap and she was still smoothing my hair. The dog came and lay down by the couch and my fingertips brushed his back. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

“All the way across the country.”

“He’ll help us. And he’ll help Yurotchka. He’s been there for five years now, and he runs a really tight ship.”

“You called him?”

“This morning.”

“It’s...so far.”

“Would you rather send her to a stranger?”

“No, of course not.”

“Yurotchka will be taken care of there.”

“Until she’s eighteen.”

“She’ll be home for summers. And breaks. And we’ll go visit her.”

“Two and a half years.”

“Calm down, love.”

“Calm down? Right.”

It sounded like running water. There was another kiss to my temple, and I curled up and let myself drift into sleep. I dreamed of the man in the picture, the man with the stern eyes and protective arm, and I dreamed of him hugging me. 


	6. 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scroll over Russian for translations!
> 
> also, quick warning: there are discussions of self-harm, depression, and anxiety in this chapter

**6**

I sat between the two of them on the plane to Logan airport. Victoria had fallen asleep as soon as we’d boarded, but Yuuri had woken her up to remind her to use her neck pillow so that she didn’t hurt herself. She was wearing an eye-mask and her hair was tied up, sleeping quietly and calmly while Yuuri shared her earbuds with me. I had my own, but we understood, without having to say anything, that we were going to share. I could see her reflection in the window while she gazed out, loss and distance on her glassy features. She could’ve been looking at anything. The world exploding, _her_ world exploding, my world exploding. Everything exploding while we rode above it all in a turbulent airplane with thin blankets and bad crackers and racist people who didn’t mind me because I was white. If I spoke to them, though, they might’ve rethought that, because I had an accent. Yuuri didn’t. Maybe I’d just let her talk. Oh, but she wasn’t white, so it was still a balancing act.

She let me take control of the iPod. I put on Bon Iver. He kept the tears at bay with a voice that was high-pitched and comforting in its winged quality. The guitar took my racing thoughts onto its strings and transformed them into something useful and helpful and meaningful. I leaned my head back against the seat and listened, and before I could see it happening Yuuri reached over and grabbed my hand. My nails were black, and hers were colorless. I considered ripping my hand away, but thought better of it and just let her hold it. It would be the last time in a while, after all.

I reached over and pulled the earbud gently from her ear. Now I was thinking about how this was our last real chance, and about how the nightmares I’d been having made me feel I could throw up my heart in involuntary sacrifice at any moment. I’d felt lost before, lost and abandoned, but this kind of lost was different. Really unfair. It was the first time I was forced into wanting help. Yuuri looked over at me with her round, brown eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“Do you remember,” I said, voice low, “when you tried to tell me that you knew what it was like? To be fucked up?”

“I wouldn’t say it like that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I remember,” she smiled, and blushed.

“What did you mean?” I asked. “Like, how do you know?”

She blinked to take in my words, then slowly reached up to tuck a strand of thick hair behind her ear. The corners of her lips timidly curled upward, she swallowed, and a glimmer in her eyes shot out like a bullet, spinning, from behind her glasses.

“Do you have makeup remover?” she said suddenly. I grabbed my bag from underneath the seat on front of me, opened the outer pocket, pulled out a pack of makeup removing wipes, and offered it to Yuuri. By that time, she’d rolled up her sleeves, and she took a single wipe. She pressed it smoothly, a paintbrush swiping along a blank canvas, first against her left wrist, then her right. My nerves were starting to act up and the pit in my stomach grew. She bundled up the wipe and stuck it in the pocket in front of her. It stretched out to accommodate the foundation-covered trash.

She held her bare wrists out so I could see them.

They were old, faded scars. It had been a long time since their red freshness.

Our dining table most days transformed into a workshop, with pencil shavings (she only wrote with perfectly sharpened pencils), erasers, stacks of half-empty notebooks, sometimes whiskey and sometimes coffee. She would hunch over the table, hair pulled back with a headband, while she wrote. I watched her write herself into another universe filled with crazed hunchbacks like her, eyes bloodshot with the words they saw themselves produce. It was a world I would never know, where the darkness of her creativity was celebrated like sunlight, and the way she pursed her lips, sucked them in toward the back of her throat, was a freeze frame on museum walls. There was nothing more intensely frustrating, because her beauty in those moments was hidden, and her rainbow drops of sweat and fatigue-ridden tears and burnt-by-passion fingertips were hers and hers alone. The same way that Victoria’s powerful, overwhelming beauty was hers and hers alone. The Japanese characters looked beautiful to me, too, especially because I couldn’t read them.

I would peer over her shoulder at the piles of paper. I’d ask her what she was writing about.

“Your smile, Yuri-chan,” she’d reply. And I’d smile mockingly for her.

Now I imagined that she was writing about those old, pale scars on her wrists. Or maybe the water bottle. But probably she was writing about Victoria.

“I was around your age when I started,” she murmured. The sun was high and set her silhouette against the window on fire.  

“Why?”

“I was hurting, and it seemed like the only thing I could control.”

I lifted my hand, and she nodded to give me permission. I rested the cold tips of my fingers on her wrists.

“I know what it’s like to feel the world against you. To feel like everything is going wrong all the time. I showed it a bit differently than you, though. Where you’re angry and loud, I was nervous and quiet. It’s a good sign. That you’re loud.”

“You’re still kinda nervous,” I said with a grin.

“Yeah. I guess I am,” she replied. “But there’s a difference between who I am now, and who I was. The difference is smaller than you might think. Important, but small.”

“I can barely tell the scars are there.”

“Still, they’re there.”

“How did you...I don’t know.”

“Get better?”

“Yeah.”

“At first I tried to fix it myself. And you can see the results of that,” she sighed. “I didn’t open up to anybody, and just found myself going further and further into that dark place. Of depression and anxiety and being afraid of everything all the time.”

“What did you do?”

“I got help.”

When I showed my concern, she raised her eyebrows and nodded toward Victoria.

“She broke into my life when I least expected it, when I was at my lowest point, and she forced me out into a world I thought wanted to destroy me. She helped me grab it by the horns and wrestle it to the ground.”

“You’re saying Victoria saved your life?” I whispered.

“No. I’m saying Victoria helped _me_ save my life.”

“I don’t have anybody like that.”

“Nonsense.” Yuuri grasped my hands again and looked me straight in the eyes. “You have us.”

“But soon you’ll be gone.”

“Come here.”

I put my head on her shoulder, and it was hard. Not like a pillow, not like Victoria’s lap, but comfortable in its own way. I closed my eyes and breathed.

“We’ll always be a phone call away. And we’ll come visit you as often as we can.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ll make friends.”

“Yeah, that’s worked out real well recently.”

“The point I’m trying to make by telling you about my scars is that you can find so much hope in opening up. It’s not a sign of weakness to open up to people. It’s a sign of strength.”

“But people are shitty. I don’t wanna open up.”

“You just haven’t found the right people.”

“I’m like...a really angry clam.”

She snorted to hold back her laughter, and I smiled a little bit.

“With a beautiful pearl inside, right?”

“I mean, yeah. But you have to be like superman to open me. I’m that angry.”

“Like those pistachios that are impossible to open.”

“Exactly.”

We giggled and our bodies quivered with exhaustion.

“ _Babushka_ opens up,” we heard. Victoria had shifted in her seat, though the position of her head and the eye-mask hadn’t moved. “And then there are little treasures inside.”

I opened my mouth, but Victoria kept talking.

“Now shut up and go to sleep.”

Yuuri winked at me, and we put our earbuds back in.

* * *

 

The man with the stern look was waiting for us at the airport. He had a large, silver SUV in short-term parking and when we met him at baggage claim, his look was just as stern in person as it was in the photograph. Victoria leaped into his arms, squeezed his neck tightly, while I stood arm-to-arm with Yuuri, watching on invisibly. They spoke to each other in Russian. Yakov’s voice was low and gruff, as if he’d spent his life smoking too many cigarettes, and when I glanced at his pocket I could see the lighter sticking out. His gray hair looked stringy and sandpaper tough, and it poured out of his hat like a short, wild waterfall.

“Yurotchka, this is Yakov. Yakov—”

“Pleasure, Yuri.” He put a hand out, and I shook it. It was a bit too firm for my liking, because it made me feel respectful. Or maybe it was his eyes. Deep and intense, not unkind, but not willing to take any shit, either.

“It’s been a while. Nice to see you again.” Yuuri bowed at the waist, and Yakov nodded.

“Well, we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. Let’s get our luggage and go.”

His accent was even heavier than Victoria’s, but I understood every word. I wondered how Yuuri felt. A Japanese woman whose English was pristine, hanging out with Russians who couldn’t even say “hello” without it sounding harsh and Russian as hell. How did it feel to hear your lover moan your name in another language?

Yakov carried one of my bags for me, but I was too loyal to my anger and defiance to thank him. As we walked to the garage, he slowed back, so that he was walking next to me.

“I know things seem shitty right now,” he said to me, in clear and old-fashioned Russian, “but you’ll get the hang of it real quickly. I’ll look out for you. I promised Victoria.”

I whipped around to stare at him, tall, domineering, intimidating and on my side, but he was looking straight ahead with pursed lips. He must have been about seventy, and he very much embodied an all-girls reform school. I was thankful he’d said that. At least I would have one ally—not one I could immediately trust, but on the surface, for now, an ally. A powerful one.

Victoria sat in the front and caught up with Yakov. I leaned my cheek against the window and drifted in and out of sleep, stuck in that disgusting limbo you feel after travel (I was used to it, prepared for it, by that point in my life), and Yuuri watched the landscape go by. Maybe she was writing a story in her head based on the weary, breathtaking New England landscapes. Or about the angry little child she’d taken in, how resilient she was, only to be broken and swayed by a few faded scars she’d shown her on a flight to a place meant to break her. Yuuri would probably write a really beautiful story about me. I thought about asking her to do it for me, but I didn’t have the courage just then, not right after she’d shown me those scars, but I told myself one day to do it. One of those days when I was peering over her shoulder at the unfamiliar Japanese characters, I could kiss her cheek and say, with a genuine smile, Will you write about me, so I can understand myself better? You’re so good with words, pork cutlet.

Soon it would be winter and the leaves would fall off the trees. I’d never experienced a New England winter. I’d heard of its horrors, but I’d never experienced it myself. Snow would cover everything, and I could let myself be cold. I would miss their birthdays, though. Both of them, only about a month apart. Victoria’s was on Christmas. None of us was religious (Victoria was born Jewish anyway), but Victoria liked to be treated like a prophet, so it was a big deal. I’d only experienced it once with them.

“Here we are,” Yakov announced two hours later. I sat up in the car seat and pressed my palm to the chilled window. We were driving underneath large, all-encompassing black gates with metal bars twisting around like snakes. We stopped at the gate’s entrance, where Yakov rolled down the window and spoke to the security guard, who lifted up the bar for us to pass. We emerged into a huge landscape, lush, with vintage brick buildings, prettier than I’d expected, scattered. All of them were connected by bridges and courtyards and, on the distant horizon, I could see the main building rising up like a behemoth. Its towers might have scraped clouds. I must have looked astonished.

“Not what you expected, eh?” Yakov said. I just shook my head. There were students, girls, supposedly from the ages of ten to eighteen, walking through those courtyards, on those bridges, their silhouettes appearing in the too-clean windows that marked the buildings. They were wearing little uniforms and carrying books, but some of them had rainbow-colored hair, piercings, tattoos. I gazed at them as if they were zoo animals—no, I think I was the zoo animal, while the car drove down the main road. Soon, as we approached what I learned was the main faculty parking lot, they became too far for me to see.

“We’ll go into this building, get all the rules straight, and then give you the keys to your room.”

The three of us sat down in Yakov’s office. He was the principal of the school, so he ran shit, and Victoria told me that was a very good thing. It was important, she said, to know people in high places, and that Yakov was the only reason they were sending me so far. He would take care of me.

“You just brought Russia over here with you, didn’t you?” I teased. Victoria narrowed her eyes at me but didn’t argue.

“A few rules. Your advisor will go over them with you again for your first meeting—”

“Advisor?”

“Each girl is assigned an advisor. Your advisor will help you navigate, keep up your grades, and stay out of trouble. Like a makeshift parental figure,” Yakov explained. His responses were smooth and rehearsed.

“Oh.”

“Give her a Russian one, would you? Surely you have some,” Victoria said. “She’s so much more comfortable when she can speak Russian.”

“Shut up and let me talk, Vitya.”

“Fine, fine.”

Yakov gave an exasperated sigh, and continued.

“Curfew is at ten. That means you need to be in your room by ten. Lights off at 11:00. And that means lights off. No exceptions. Your schedule will be the same every day. You’ll have regular academic classes in the morning, including an hour break for lunch. You’ll get another break in the afternoon, and then you’ll take part in various rehabilitative activities.”

“What...what does that mean?” Yuuri interjected anxiously.

“Group therapy. Individual meetings with your advisor. Sports and other activities that will help you therapeutically,” Yakov replied. “You’ll get used to the system quickly, I promise.”

Yakov kept talking, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was sitting next to a window, and in the bushes right outside, I saw a cat, curled up and comfortable. She was beautiful, with beige fur and a brown face, like the ragdolls I followed on Instagram, but she seemed a bit more rugged. She was curled up beneath the leaves, licking her paw and then swiping it over her tiny, perfect face. My eyes stuck to her like magnets. Yakov’s words floated over me—this cat, this beautiful little creature, deserved my undying attention. I wanted to make her my first friend. I wrung my fingers together in my lap and started to get fidgety. Any moment now, she could stand up and wander off, and I would only catch a glimpse of her puffy tail before she disappeared with no promise that I would ever see her again. My patience was running out.

“Yuri?”

The sound of name pulled me back. I looked at Yakov with involuntarily wide eyes.

“Does that all sound okay?”

“Y-yeah,” I replied.

“Well,” Victoria said, “you’re oddly complacent today, [котенок](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA).”

“Can I...can I go outside for a second?”

The three of them looked at each other.

“There’s a cat outside.”

“Yurotchka, this is serious.”

“I know! But if I don’t go out, like, now, she’ll...”

My voice trailed off. When I looked over, the cat was gone.

“Never mind.” 


	7. 7

**7**

When we said goodbye, Yuuri was holding back tears. Accompanied by Yakov, we’d gone to the residential building where I was going to spend the next two and a half years of my life, used the old, past-its-expiration-date elevator to go up to the fourth floor, and dumped my bags in a small double room. Half of it was already decorated, embellished with photographs, the bed made nicely and papers organized. My half was dusty and looked like it could have been rotting, housing a ghost, maybe. Yakov gave me a lanyard with my room keys and ID card—so that everybody knew that I was fucked up—and now it was time for Yuuri and Victoria to leave. Victoria hugged me first, pressing my head gently against her chest while her lips fell down on my yellow scalp. I could’ve held her more tightly, but I didn’t.

Part of me was angry with them. A big part of me, and very angry. I knew it wasn’t their fault, _I knew it wasn’t their fault_ , I knew it wasn’t their fault, but I was so fucking pissed off that they hadn’t fought harder for me. That they hadn’t held out their hands and said, Take me instead—but Jesus, that would’ve been a really stupid thing to do and I would’ve been angry with them then, too. Victoria had yelled, there in the courtroom, but I wished that she had yelled louder. Thrown punches. She’d promised me, the moment she took me into her home, that she would love me and take care of me and _fight_ for me, and I couldn’t help but feel like she had broken her promise.

Victoria was always capricious and her promises were flimsy, so I suppose that was natural. It was something Yuuri had warned me about—Victoria, she said, Victoria can be a little wild and a little all over the place. Don’t ever think that means she’s not thinking of what’s best for you. She’s hard to understand but everything she does is for a reason, even if sometimes she acts like a child.

After all was said and done I got to know Victoria better. I got invested in her more. Maybe it was the Russian, the silver hair, the way that I wanted to _be her_ despite trying to tell myself I hated her. I wanted her to teach me things and tell me stories and I always wanted her to be singing to me, but my pride kept me from asking for those things until it was too late. I guess I’d just assumed I would get it because she’d promised.

But Yuuri was even less at fault than stupid, beautiful Victoria. In the midst of her nervousness, anxiety, the way that I pushed her away with the heels of my palms against her vulnerable chest, she was only ever kind to me. Unlike Victoria, she took what I threw at her without trying to dodge, without really fighting back. Where Victoria threatened to ground me, take away my phone and my laptop, looked at me with her judgmental, quietly aggressive eyes, Yuuri just let me scream. The gentleness in her voice and the slow blinks of her eyes inspired me in weird, introspective ways. She was my reminder of what it meant to be with people.

And despite all the ways they had suffered for me, cried over me, spent their nights talking about ways to help me, I was so fucking mad at them. In my dreams they’d screamed at the judge in Russian, then in Japanese, then in vulgar English so he could understand and be afraid. In my dreams they’d refused to let them handcuff me in the first place, refused to let them take my clothes and my computer, refused to let them do any of the things they’d done. They’d refused to fly me all the way to Boston to drop me off at some rehab center for fucked up teenagers.

I was so mad at them, despite knowing that, really, really, they had done all they could.

_They’d done all they could._

Yuuri hugged me when Victoria had finished whispering Russian proverbs in my ear. With a desperation I’d felt in her hugs before. Sometimes Victoria would walk into the living room and ask me where Yuuri was, saying, “She probably hasn’t been hugged enough today,” and she’d open her arms and go find her wife.

“We’re a phone call away,” Yuuri said. I nodded, and my cheek rubbed against the cotton of her sweater. The first time she’d tried to hug me I’d pushed her away and locked myself in my room for the rest of the night.

“Thanks, guys,” I murmured.

“Why don’t we stay and help you get settled?” Victoria asked.

“No, I’d really rather you guys just leave now.”

Victoria sighed, and Yuuri touched her shoulder with an understanding smile. I sat down on my bed, hands folded in my lap, worried that if I stared up at their earnest gazes for too long I would start to cry and betray the charade I had created. They leaned down, one on each side, and kissed my temples. Their lips left refreshing imprints on my brain.

“Be good, Yuri-chan,” Yuuri said at the door.

“Not too good,” Victoria winked.

And then they were gone.

 

* * *

 

The sheets, as I curled into them and held the limp pillow to my chest, smelled like mothballs and dust. With my black fingernail, I carved patterns, the entire Russian alphabet, into the mattress. The bed was probably leaving marks on my cheek, the ones you get after a long and disorienting nap, and I couldn’t see clearly because the corner of my eye was pressed to the bed, too. But I savored the discomfort, the bra digging into my skin, the jeans too tight around my stomach, the ickiness of airplanes and car rides and love that wasn’t enough to save me. Instead of packing, I gazed listlessly across the room at the colorful side of the room that was already occupied. I conjured images of my head of what kind of person I would be living with. Maybe she was really tall, and had to use crutches to walk because she was so tall. Maybe her hair was so long that it trailed behind her on the floor like the train of a wedding dress when she walked, and people tripped over it all the time. The only thing I could really tell was that she liked to take photographs, but my curiosity wasn’t enough to overcome my hollowness at that particular moment; I couldn’t summon the energy to go look at the photos more closely.

I thought about how I should’ve hugged Yuuri one more time, and asked Victoria to sing to me one more time. Maybe that would’ve helped. Not a lot, and not for certain, but it didn’t matter because now I would never know.

When I got up to unpack, I started crying, so I lie back in bed and let myself cry until my body ached.

 

* * *

 

I was asleep when the door opened and my new roommate walked in.

“Oh, shoot, sorry,” I heard her say. My eyes opened and I sat up, stretched my arms out, realized that I wasn’t wearing pants and had kicked the blanket off my body at some point during my nap. I wasn’t sure what time it was. I brushed the hair back from my face with my fingers so I could see her more clearly.

The first thing I realized was that she wasn’t she. From what I could tell, at least, she was he. He was short, though a bit taller than me and maybe a bit older, with dark skin, shimmering black hair cropped short, and deep, dramatic eyes that I just fell into. His smile, welcoming and undeniably charming, was blinding. He wasn’t wearing the skirt that I’d seen other students wearing. Instead, he was wearing well-tailored pants that accentuated the muscles in his legs when he moved to close the door behind him. Then he turned to face me.

“I should’ve been more quiet. You’re probably wicked exhausted from that trip,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied thoughtlessly.

“Wow, sorry, I haven’t even introduced myself. Rude, much?” He stepped forward and stretched his hand out. When I shook it, I realized that he must use a lot of moisturizer. It was the smoothest, softest hand I’d ever shaken. “I’m Phichit.”

“Cool name,” I murmured.

“Thanks. It’s Thai.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“Conquer,” he said proudly. “You’re...Yuri, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What does that mean?”

“In Russian? Nothing. I think in Hebrew it means light of god, or something.”

“You Jewish?”

“No. Maybe? Probably not.”

He smiled, and looked like he was waiting for me to say something else, so I just gestured toward the bed and he sat down.

“Your accent’s cute,” he said while he untied his loafers.

“Really? I’ve been trying to get rid of it.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Are you from Russia, then?”

“Yeah. I lived there until I was ten.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Moscow.”

“Amazing. Where’d you live before this?”

“California.”

“That’s far,” he observed, brow furrowing. His eyebrows were amazing.

“Yeah. What about you?”

“Thailand, until I came here with my parents a few years back.”

“You don’t even have an accent.”

“Nope.”

He smiled again, with the confidence of someone who’d known me for years, and I didn’t smile back, but I didn’t frown, either. I liked him. He was nice, and he still hadn’t asked me about why I was here, and that made me relieved.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Fifteen.”

“Baby!” He slapped his own cheeks, like a proxy for slapping mine, and I blinked in surprise. “You’re so little!”

“I mean...I’m not _that_ little.”

“Do you want me to help you unpack?”

“Y-you don’t—”

“It’ll go way faster that way.”

He stood up, dusted himself off, and waited for me to open the suitcases. I just stared at him for a little. Unsure of the ways my face was contorting. He was surprisingly welcoming, surprisingly warm, and I wasn’t quite sure how to take it. His voice sounded like a flamenco and his eyes shimmered like stars, even in the bright light of the room. I stood up, my legs shaky, and realized that I still hadn’t put pants on. He didn’t seem to mind, and I didn’t really care, either, so I just stayed in my underwear.

“Oh! Wait!” he cried as I grabbed the suitcase. “We have to take a picture. To commemorate the first moment we became roommates.”

He whipped out his phone, an expensive one with a really great camera, and pulled me in next to him. He smiled a smile so perfect I thought I was imagining it, and I just pursed my lips a little and stared into the camera.

“Holy cow, you’re so photogenic,” he whistled, looking at the picture. “Mind if I put this on Insta?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ll tag you. What’s your account name?”

My face became red, and I started fidgeting with a strand of hair. I could feel him looking at me.

“Yuri...?”

“RussianTiger0301,” I yelled, quickly. He pursed his lips to hold back his laughter. “Shut up! Don’t laugh!”

“I’m...not laughing,” he lied, staring at his phone screen. “Nice account. You’ve got the lighting down.”

“What are you, a professional photographer or something?”

I picked up my phone as it pinged with the notifications. One new follower; phichit+chu tagged you in a photo. I followed him back. The picture was good. He captioned it, “New roommate’s cute as hell!!! @RussianTiger0301.”

“I mean...kinda? Trying to be, at least,” he replied.

“Seriously?”

“Wanna see my photographs?”

I followed him over to his side of the room, where he showed me the photographs covering the wall. Portraits, landscapes, animals, flowers, everything. Mostly portraits, though. Of what I assumed were members of Phichit’s family, Phichit’s friends, from the backgrounds of the photos, other students here. There was a large, elaborate camera with at least three different lenses on Phichit’s desk that I only noticed right then. It was colder on his side because, despite the weather, he kept the window cracked open. There were a lot of selfies, too.

“Awesome,” I heard myself say.

“I’m trying to get a portfolio together so I can apply to schools and stuff,” he explained. “My dream school’s in Chicago.”

“I’ve never been to Chicago,” I said.

“Me, neither.”

I stared at the pictures, and then I looked over at Phichit, his hands on his hips while he admired his handiwork. I noticed his short hair, his flat chest, his absolute comfort.

“If you’re a guy, why are you at a reform school for girls?” I suddenly asked, before realizing that it was a rude, rash question to ask. When he turned to meet my eyes the guilt hit me. “S-sorry, that was pretty personal. Never mind.”

“It’s fine.”  

Phichit smiled. It was a pained smile, though. The kind of smile that he had shown too many people. I could tell, because I had a smile like that, although at some point down the line I had just stopped bothering with it. Then, without a word, he lifted his shirt up. Beneath his shirt were tight bindings.

“Gender dysphoria,” he said. “That’s what the doctors called it.”

“The hell is gender dysphoria?”

“I’m trans. But my parents think their perfect little daughter is crazy and sent me here.” Phichit laughed dryly and let his shirt fall. “They wouldn’t even change my name on my ID card! Rude, right? Nobody here calls me Phitchaya.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. I sat down next to him on the bed.

“Eh, I’m used to it. Actually, everyone here accepts me way more than people back home. People anywhere, really. Everyone is nice here. Everyone understands.”

“Understands?”

“That we’re different.” Phichit grabbed his camera and fiddled with it in his hands. “That we’re outcasts. So we have to stick together.”

I couldn’t say anything to that.

“Still, we’re just looking for people to accept us.”

“Nobody accepts me out there, and nobody’ll accept me in here.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll see. When you start going to classes and stuff. You’ll see what I mean.”

Phichit smiled again. Then, he attached a lens to his camera.

“Would you mind if I took a picture of you, just like that?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re gorgeous.”

I fell silent, and gave him permission through a flick of my wrist. He snapped the photograph, without flash.

“Thanks. Let’s unpack?”


	8. 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, scroll over underlined Russian phrases for the translation!
> 
> xoxo

**8**

        On my way to my advisor’s office, for our first meeting, I walked as slowly as I could. I put on my new skirt, reaching down to the middle of my thighs (it was supposed to be knee-length but I pulled it up and made it tighter so it would fit like a high-waisted skirt), and it made me look absurdly feminine. I glanced in the mirror before I left, and it accentuated the curves and paleness of my legs and pointedness of my toes. I stepped into black loafers, like Phichit’s, and followed the map that I had been given of the school. With its old dramatic buildings and confusing halls and detailed room layout. I’d been given permission by Yakov to skip class for the day—I wouldn’t have to start, really, until tomorrow—so I made my way to my advisor’s office, marked on the map with a big red star, when I woke up and found myself coherent enough and with an acceptable level of energy. My appointment with my advisor was technically at eight, but I decided to go early and see if they were there. I stepped into my skirt in the early, quiet orange darkness of the room, buttoned it around my waist, and my eyes fell on Phichit for a moment. He was asleep, back toward me, and he wasn’t making a sound. Not a snore, not even a breath, while he slept. I decided to forego the lipstick and just swiped the eyeliner across my lids, then slipped out of the room and walked as slowly as I could.

        There were a few other students out this early. Gathering in corners that were comfortable to them, familiar to them, with people they had grown accustomed to talking to this early in the morning while they looked out of the clean, embellished windows like made-up people in a catalogue. But everyone, with their diverse facial expressions and rebellious hairstyles and defiant scowls, looked kind of out of place in such an elaborate, beautiful building, wearing these uniforms. I was no exception, of course. Me, who liked to wear high tops and leopard print and leather and black hoodies and fishnets under torn shorts, in a black pleated skirt and periwinkle sweater vest. It was laughable, so laughable that I almost wanted to tear a hole in the sweater myself. Paint leopard spots on it with my black nail polish, dip it in glue and pour glitter on it, sew a hood onto the back. I felt thrown out of space and time here.

        The strangest thing was that as I walked, and as people glanced up to look at me, I didn’t get any stares. When they murmured to each other, I didn’t once imagine that they were talking about me. And that blew my mind.

        I had to go down one of those wide, classic-looking corridors, high above the ground, like a bridge between the residential building and the faculty building, with windows on either side. My fingertips pressed to the windows as I walked, years between each step. I stared out at the campus while my fingers painted my path against the glass. The garden was impeccable, the courtyards complete with fountains and little cobblestone paths. Sometimes I would lean my head against the window just to feel how cold it was and, now that it was practically winter, it was really cold. As I walked, breath visible on the windows, I wanted somebody to love. The only two people I’d had to love were gone and I so desperately wanted someone to love. I tucked my hair behind my ear, saw myself do it in the glass, and tried to imagine what other people thought when they saw me in this skirt. She’s too skinny, she’s too pale, it should be shorter, it should be longer, who is that, I don’t care who that is. I had headphones in my ears and I liked the fact that nobody else knew what I was listening to. Led Zeppelin. Because I liked the guitar solos that Yuuri had ranted about. Artistry, Yuri-chan, it’s just artistry.  

        My reflection didn’t quite look real. My hair looked too messy, my eyes too bloodshot, the wings uneven and flaky, my skin too shriveled and gray. I didn’t look like me at all, so if I stared at my reflection for too long, tears gathered on the edges of my stupid not-green-enough eyes. But still I walked slowly. Letting the feeling of glass seep into my fingertips until I couldn’t tell the difference between glass and air, silence and guitar solos, invisible air and my foggy breaths.

        Yuuri and Victoria walked through the gardens. They were holding hands the way young children, who’ve vowed to love each other forever, might hold hands. Victoria was taller, and with her other hand brushed the petals of the impeccably groomed flowers. The smile on her face was hard to interpret, but frighteningly lovely. And Yuuri, beside her, squeezed her hand and stared up at the sky as if waiting for the invisible stars to fall. They walked in circles around the fountain.

        Across the corridor and into the faculty building, I got lost for fifteen minutes trying to navigate the labyrinthine halls of this school, until I finally found myself before the door of my assigned advisor. There was a name plaque and everything, so I knew it was theirs. And I knew that Yakov, maybe upon Victoria’s request, had given me “a Russian one.” It was just the name. It was so Russian. Seeing it made me feel calmer, helped me breathe easier, and I hated that because it meant in some way that I wasn’t ready for this country, this language, this world. To need something so trivial just to feel at ease.

        I took a deep breath, furrowed my brows, puckered my lips, and knocked on the door. I hoped that she was inside.

        “[Войдите](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5!) **,** ” came a harsh voice from inside. She must have been expecting me. I opened the door, stepped into the bright light of the office, and closed the door quickly behind me. The map was still in my hands.

        She was sitting at her desk and she terrified me.

        Her hair was pitch black, pulled back nice and taut and wrapped into a perfect bun atop her head. It was smooth, slicked back, accentuated her high cheekbones. Every feature of her face, her nose, her lips, her eyebrows, her jaw, everything was angled as if drawn using a hard, straight ruler. She wore too much makeup, her clothes were too beautiful for sitting at a desk and dealing with fucked up teenagers, and her peach lips were pressed so tightly together that there may as well have been double-sided tape attaching her bottom and upper lips. There was a strange, eerie beauty to her—I imagined that, when she was younger, she was gorgeous.

        Her name was Lilia Baranovskaya. I could tell from her accent (it was like Victoria’s) that she was from St. Petersburg. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she’d just fashioned her accent to fit the St. Petersburg accent. Her desk, her bookshelf, the small sitting area, everything was excruciatingly tidy. I immediately felt out of place and my anger, that natural defiance I was talking about, rose up to protect me.

        She was typing on a computer, back perfectly straight. After I closed the door, I just stood, my back nearly pressed against it. After a few moments, her eyes still gazing at the computer screen, she addressed me.

        “Yuri Plisetsky.”

        “[ **привет**](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82)[.](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82)”

        Her eyes finally veered toward me, and she shifted in her seat so that she was facing me head-on.

        “You know me well enough to use informal greetings, do you, [девушка](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B0)?”

        There was spite in her voice. I glared angrily.

        “I’ll use whatever greetings I want, [баба](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%B0) **.** ”

        It was stupid of me, and I knew it was stupid of me, but I said it anyway. She stared at me, hard, for a bit. My spirit shriveled a little bit beneath her icy eyes.

        “Sit down,” she ordered.

        “No.”

        She almost seemed impressed. Maybe a little bit amused. Which was fine, because everything I did in my life was probably performative anyway. I stood stubbornly and rudely where I was.

        Lilia Baranovskaya stood up, and the grace with which she moved across her desk toward me took me off-guard. I flinched when she stepped right in front of me, hand clasped behind her back, staring down as if I were a bug. I looked up at her powerlessly while I imagined her swallowing me whole with those lips.

        “I’m not your enemy,” she said blankly.

        “Everyone’s my enemy.”

        “Oh?”

        “If I’ve learned anything from life, it’s that.”

        “Well, I certainly have a lot of work ahead of me,” she sneered. But, despite the harshness of her voice, I saw something special in her eyes. A glimmer of kindness, shining hope and sincerity, experience and determination. An eye for beauty looking down at me.

        “Sit down,” she repeated, gesturing toward an armchair.

        I sat.

        She sat across from me, in a matching armchair, with her legs crossed and her hands laid delicately on her knee. Her perfection—save the excessive makeup—stunned me. She looked as if she came straight out of the storybooks I used to have read to me as a child in Moscow. She was the stuff of Russian folklore, she was the example Americans and Europeans used to describe Russian women, she was inspiring and terrifying all at once.

        “What, am I supposed to tell you my life story now?” I said.

        “No. I don’t care about your past,” she replied. I blinked at her. “Throw yourself away. Your past self is dead—to me. And she should be dead to you, too.”

        “That sounds like a load of crap coming from a counselor at a reform school.”

        “Strength comes from the ability to be reborn. To change when it’s necessary.”

        “What if I don’t want to change?”

        “Look me in the eyes, [девушка](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B0), and tell me you don’t want to change.”

        I avoided her eyes.

        “Up here! Look me in the eyes.”

        I looked up into her eyes and I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t want to change.

        “I...”

        “Where does your hesitance come from? Tell me.”

        “No. I barely know you.”

        “Very well. We have all the time in the world to get to know each other.”

        “You make it sound...mechanical.”

        Her tight lips finally curled up into a knowing, expectant smile.

        “No. Not mechanical. But I know what I’m doing,” she said confidently. “I want you to know, Yuri Plisetsky, that I am not your enemy. My goal, and my _only_ goal, is to help you become the beautiful work of art you were meant to be.”

        “Beautiful...what?” I hissed.

        “You are beautiful. Like a work of art. Once you’ve seen your own beauty and found the ability to have pride in yourself, my job will be complete. Once you’ve discovered your own meanings of love, change, beauty, my job will be complete. Each person is sustained by different types of love and beauty. My job is to help you find yours.”

        “[ **Чушь собачья**](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%A7%D1%83%D1%88%D1%8C%20%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%87%D1%8C%D1%8F.)[.](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%A7%D1%83%D1%88%D1%8C%20%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%87%D1%8C%D1%8F.)”

        “Do you really think so?”

        Her voice, her accusations, had a way of forcing me to look inside myself and answer her questions—if not for her, then for myself. For the first time she was making me thinking about changing myself, and the concept terrified me, because I’d been the same for so long.

        “I’m not asking you to change who you are. That would be unfair, and that would be impossible, and that would be useless. You are who you are, and who you are is beautiful regardless of the ugly you’ve done. Finding beauty does not mean changing who you are—it means being reborn better. I will not make you change who you are.”

        “But you told me to throw away my past self.”

        “The core of who you are stays the same regardless of time and place,” she said, smiling. “Throw away the ugliness of your past self so you can be a better version of you. A more beautiful work of art.”

        My gaze began to waver in my uncertainty and discomfort. I looked around the room, tried to find anything to latch onto, but it was too clean and organized and perfect and not personal at all.

        “You have strength. I see it in your eyes,” she said.

        I bit down on my lower lip and was afraid because I believed her.    

        “Yuri Plisetsky.”

        I straightened up.

        “If you give me your heart, your soul, your mind, and your trust, I will help you in ways you never thought possible. But you must put in the work. Because the only person who can help you, the only person who can discover your beauty, is you. Do we have a deal?”

        She leaned forward and stretched her hand, with her long nails and straight bones, out toward me. I looked at it for a few moments before I bent forward at the waist and shook it.

        “Good girl. You will come see me three times a week, after school. Understood?”

        “Okay.”

        She nodded in approval.

        “Go rest before classes tomorrow. The bags under your eyes are darker than your nails.”

        I furrowed my brow and scrambled to my feet as she stood, walked around her desk, and sat back down.

        “Fine.”

        I put my hand on the doorknob and opened the door.

        “By the way, I’m all right with the shortened skirt and the black rather than white socks, but don’t take it too far, [девушка](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B0).”

        When I turned over my shoulder to respond, her attention was on her computer and her lips were shut as if she had never even said a word. As I closed the door, took out my map, and slowly made my way back to my room, my lips ached from my attempts to hold back a smile.


	9. 9

**9**

I took a detour and sat in one of the courtyards for a little bit. I had nowhere to be, nothing to do, so I sat on a stone bench and let my legs sway. My toes barely brushed the hard earth. I slipped out of the loafers and watched my toes wiggle in the soft black tube socks. Air cold on my skin, uncomfortable, and I savored it. My eyes, tired and sore, followed the students, mostly fucked up girls like me, walking past. Through the windows high above, in the corridors. Cutting across the courtyard, scurrying to escape the biting chill, to get from one building to the next. Some were alone, some in pairs, some moving together like little flocks of white, fluttering birds. But for a few blinks, a few scowls, even a few kind smiles, nobody noticed me shivering on the stone bench, white earbuds hanging down across my chest. I kept thinking I caught a glimpse of Victoria’s too-young-to-be-silver silver hair, or the shine of Yuuri’s glasses. I didn’t find it very fair of them to haunt me like that.

When I’d been sitting there long enough—my shoulders trembled—I stood, map in hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flicker of white. It was outrageously early for snow, even in the winter wasteland of New England. When I turned, though, it wasn’t snow. It was the cat, darker than snow but whiter than most other things. She was prowling in the bush, letting her large tail curl, rhythmic as a golden pendulum, around the thin, dry leaves. Maybe she could feel me looking at her, stiff as I was, because she turned to look at me in that moment. A language poured out from her ice eyes, dry, a language that only the two of us understood—the same way that Yuuri and Victoria could recite poetry to one another in musical silences. Her fur rippled in the breeze, her small face brown, puckered like a flower. Quiet, playful, haughty like me, she lifted her chin up and sauntered off down the narrow path.

I followed without a second thought.

I took out my earbuds, curled them around my phone (now programmed with a school-wide app that sloppily restricted websites I visited, apps I downloaded, music I listened to, and people I messaged), and stuffed everything into my loafers. Then I tiptoed in my socks, feeling as if I were walking on ice, or clouds, or anything that wasn’t earth, after that cat. After yesterday, for a little bit, I’d just assumed my needy, desperate brain had conjured her up. But now I was sure that she was real.

I made sure to keep a safe distance, so I didn’t scare her, even though I was convinced that she knew I was following her. Hadn’t that been the whole point of looking at me like that? Inviting me with the flickers of her tail and the mysterious shimmer of her round, _round_ , eyes? I kept my distance anyway, and I tiptoed anyway. The path she was walking became narrower as it led out of the courtyard and under an arch, where ivy climbed and frolicked. Her steps were light and elegant, and she seemed to know where she was going. So I followed.

Suddenly I heard voices. But they were muffled—at least two of them. Maybe three? I couldn’t really tell. They weren’t speaking, not clearly. Just a series of short, rapid breaths, maybe a murmur. I started hearing them when the cat slipped through a narrow entrance into another courtyard, this one much smaller. Even with my small, slender body, I could just barely get through. The cat went through with ease. Before I could follow, I saw her jump up onto a small ledge, over an archway, and disappear. The voices were still there, and despite my disappointment at yet again losing sight of the cat (maybe she was just my imagination?), my curiosity was on fire. Someone was in the tiny courtyard. I slid my body through the narrow entrance sideways, back pressed to the jagged stones, and then reached my neck around to catch a glimpse of the corner of the courtyard.

When I saw them, I pressed my palms against my lips so they wouldn’t hear me.

Two people, like I’d suspected. And they weren’t talking. A girl, maybe my age, maybe a little bit older, with jet-black hair, thick, wavy, at her shoulders. I couldn’t see her eyes because they were closed, but she was pale, and her eyebrows were thick, and I imagined that she must have been very beautiful. Her back was pressed against the wall, her arms around the neck of someone I recognized: Phichit. He had his arms at her waist, his fingers curled around her, and they were kissing. Their lips crashed against each other, over and over again in different patterns, embellished with breaths that were high, low, short, rapid. The girl’s cheeks were bright red, and her eyelids, pink and glittery, quivered. Her fingers danced in his hair, messed it up, pulled on it, while he pressed her to the wall.

They pulled apart for a moment, and he whispered something against her puckered, thin lips, where saliva shined. I couldn’t make out what he said, but she opened her eyes and I saw that they were black and lightless. I pressed my head against the wall, out of sight, so they couldn’t see me. Until I heard them kissing again and peered my head back around.

They seemed to move in slow motion. I could see, in such detail, every movement of Phichit’s hands, now cupping her small, round breast. His other hand sliding up her sweater and touching the pale skin above the waistline of her lint-covered skirt. I practically saw her skin turn red beneath his touch. Her hands were on his cheeks now, pulling him in tighter, and their tongues wrapped around each other in a music-less, lustful dance that sent my head spinning. One of his hands moved down to her thigh, lifted it until her leg was wrapped around his body, like a snake, like he was asking her to crush him. His fingers peeled away the pleats of her skirt, until they danced along the line of her white panties.

I crossed my own legs while I stood and pulled my skirt down, clenched my teeth, willed that this familiar queasiness in my stomach disappear.

He started to kiss her neck and her teeth, dripping, sank into her lower lip. Her nails were making marks in the back of his sweater. I saw it, I saw his tongue, pushing down on her neck. She arched her neck back and let out a moan that shook the earth beneath my feet.

I couldn’t anymore. I stumbled out of the small archway I’d made my haven and tripped over myself to get back to the stone bench. I took out my phone and headphones, slipped into my shoes, and went right into the nearest building. I forced myself to breathe—I heard Victoria’s voice in my head, reminding me to breathe between her lullabies—and took a moment to regain my composure. And then despise myself for how disgusting I was, pushing my thighs together and biting down on my lip. I should’ve gone as soon as I’d realized what they were doing, because that was a haven to them. A special place where they could be away from the eyes of others, and I had destroyed that.

I hadn’t recognized it initially because it had sounded so different from Victoria and Yuuri. Those two, they were experienced with each other. They were slow and delicate and immaculate, they were never superfluous and the sounds they made, the words they said, the breaths and the moans they let escape their lips, always came together as a beautiful, thought-out melody that they’d practiced and perfected after years of rolling around in the sheets together. But Phichit, Phichit and that girl, they’d had no idea what they were doing. But they’d done it beautifully. In their lack of experience I had seen something inspiring and I hated myself so much for it.

Guilty and clumsy, I went back to my room. Of course, after wandering around totally lost for about twenty minutes. I took off everything—my skirt, my sweater, my bra, my socks, and I collapsed in bed and let my hair fall over my face. I couldn’t get the images out of my head, so I tried to sleep, but it was useless. So I tinkered on my phone.

The program they’d tried to download was so easy to get around that I’d figured it out almost immediately, and wondered how their IT team would feel if they knew some fifteen year-old girl had hacked their pride and joy of a censorship app in less than twenty minutes.

At around noon, Victoria called, and put me on speaker so she and Yuuri could both talk to me.

“It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours,” I mocked.

“We just want to see how you’re doing so far!” Victoria said. “Have you made any friends?”

“Define ‘friend.’”

“At least tell us you’ve talked to your roommate,” Yuuri sighed.

“Yeah, he’s fine.”

“...He?”

“He’s trans.”

“Ah. Well, doesn’t make a difference as long as he’s nice to you,” Victoria replied.

“He’s nice, don’t worry.”

“Did you meet your advisor?”

I told them about Lilia, and Victoria laughed really hard. I told them about the cat, just to prove to them that I hadn’t been imagining it yesterday. I told them that I was starting classes tomorrow and they wished me luck. Yuuri reminded me to go to the cafeteria and eat lunch. After we’d talked for about fifteen minutes, we said goodbye and they told me they loved me. Then I ignored what Yuuri had told me and stayed in bed through lunch. Since Phichit wasn’t in the room, and I wasn’t sure when he’d be coming back from class, I put some clothes on, took out my laptop—whose program I’d also easily managed to get around—and filmed a video diary. Detailing my first day, while _babushka_ sat on my keyboard to listen. After that, I decorated my room with what little shit I had, putting _babushka_ right in the center of my desk. Then I took a selfie with my new room, posted it to Instagram, and noticed that I suddenly had at least fifty new followers.  

 I checked Phichit’s account and saw that he had thousands and thousands of followers who were starting to spill over since the selfie we’d taken last night, and my ego soared a little bit higher.

Phichit was able to guess, when he walked into the room around five, that I had skipped my meals.

“I should’ve come to get you at lunch,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“You must be starving. Let’s go. You can meet my friends and stuff. They’re a bit older than you, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem. They’re cool.”

“All as fucked up as me?”

He smiled, but didn’t answer.

The cafeteria was five minutes away, through a corridor high above the ground, opposite the faculty building I’d visited earlier that day. As we walked, Phichit pointed out the buildings to me, even named off some of the courtyards, and told me he would help me get to class tomorrow.

“It seems like a maze, I know, but you’ll get used to it,” he said with a winning smile. When he smiled like that I saw his lips on that girl’s neck, and when he pointed toward the building where classes were held, I saw his finger tracing the line of her underwear. I didn’t say much, for fear that I would say something stupid, and I tried to pay attention to what he was saying to me but I failed miserably.

He walked me through the process of the cafeteria. It was huge, meant to be able to fit every student at the school at the same time if necessary, with long rectangular tables, some circular ones, smaller ones and bigger ones and everything in between. He said we were making it just before the dinner rush. He showed me where the trays were, where the lines for burgers, or hot dogs, or pizza, or whatever was on the menu, were. He pointed to the table where his friends were sitting and, with a hand on my elbow, led me over. I had hardly said a word.

There were three people at the table, Phichit’s best friends, he clarified. I wasn’t surprised to see that one of them was the girl from earlier. She was reading a book, picking at her food, a disinterested look on her face, which was quite the contrast to the expressions she’d been making this morning. Phichit took a seat beside her. There were two other girls, sitting close to each other, speaking in loud, lively tones. The girl on the right, the taller one, had bronze skin, short copper hair, an infectious smile. The girl beside her was paler and shorter, with lighter brown hair and round eyes.

“Guys, this is Yuri, my new roommate. She just got in yesterday.”

They all fell silent and looked up at me. I plopped down into the seat, but didn’t say anything.

“Yuri, this is Seung-ah,” Phichit introduced the girl next to him.

“Nice to meet you, I guess,” I said. Jealous, of course.  

“Likewise. Although, not really,” Seung-ah sighed. I blinked at her. “I really don’t care much, but don’t take it personally. I’m sure by normal standards you’re a wonderful person. Whatever that means.”

“I’m not, but thanks. What are you reading?”

“Foucault. _The Archaeology of Knowledge_.”

“Oh. Cool.”

Seung-ah shrugged. She was rather beautiful, rather enigmatic. But she was cold. And if opposites really did attract, it made sense that she was with Phichit.

“I’m Lea.” The taller girl, with the bronze skin, gave me a smile.

“Guanghong. Nice to meet you,” the other girl added. I learned that they were all two years above me. They didn’t ask me what I’d done to land myself there, so I didn’t ask them, either. Lea was from LA, and she wore a cross around her neck and was very Catholic. Guanghong was raised in Beijing but moved to Boston as a teenager. Seung-ah, though I only learned this much later and through Phichit, was from Seoul.

Except for Seung-ah, they were all very lively. It irritated me a little bit, but at the same time I never felt pressured to speak, and they never looked to me for my opinion, so I was able to shovel down my food without even having to pause to breathe. I was tempted to look under the table to see if Phichit and Seung-ah were playing footsie, or locking pinkies, or something. Seeing them sitting together made me hot and flustered as the images kept replaying in my head like an annoying reel. They were talking about a haunted house on school grounds.

“It used to be for the servants of the students. You know, in the old days when this was an actual boarding school for rich girls,” Phichit said with a raise of his eyebrows.

“There isn’t a house like that,” Guanghong replied.

“Sure there is! Out at the entrance of the woods behind the parking lot.”

“So that’s what that is,” Lea interjected.

“It’s definitely haunted. I’ve heard stories of people walking past at night and hearing laughter from inside,” Phichit continued.

“That’s straight bullshit,” Lea laughed.

“I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight,” Guanghong pouted.

As they talked, I found it unbelievable that these people were at a reform school. With their kind smiles, their high-energy, how Phichit drew everyone in with his white smile, how Seung-ah just kept to herself and read her book, how Lea and Guanghong would whisper in each other’s ears the way best friends on television do. Surely none of them could possibly be as fucked up as me, with my stupid anger and my short temper and my determination to be disliked. I sat there scowling, wondering how I could be a friend to any of them—if they let me into their circle, they’d drive me back out eventually. So I didn’t get comfortable. 


	10. 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scroll over Russian for translation!! 
> 
> xoxo

10

The true meaning of reform school hit me—no, I think the word smashed is more appropriate—on my first day of class.

I got out of bed on my first alarm. I’d always had a talent for doing that, and Yuuri would gawk at how I’d never hit the snooze button in my entire life. I liked to think I got it from Victoria, but that wasn’t really possible since I didn’t meet her until I was fourteen. We were both good at getting up early. Maybe for her it was just habit. I guess it was habit for me, too. Phichit was still asleep, so I moved quietly. I went outside to the communal bathroom, and as I brushed my teeth, yellow hair pulled back with a thick headband, another girl walked in to wash her face and do her makeup. She had tan, blemish-free skin, darker than mine but a little lighter than Phichit’s. Bronzed, smooth, like she’d been evenly kissed by the sun. Her eyebrows were thick and black, heavy-set above dark eyelashes and soul-seeing blue eyes. The way that the ocean looks when the sun is at its highest point. Her hair was black, reached all the way to her waist, silky smooth and almost inhumanly thick. Angled, perfectly cut bangs fell across her eyes, parted down the middle. She tied her hair back before she washed her face.

“You’re new,” she said to me as I brushed. A statement, not a question, and that turned me off.

“What of it?” I grumbled.

“Oh, and look at that accent!”

I watched her put on her makeup while I scowled at her in the mirror. And when I was done brushing my teeth, I started doing my makeup, too. By the time she was done, she really looked as if a celebrity makeup artist had done her face up. Eyeliner, mascara, contour, dark nude lipstick to match glimmering eye shadow on her large lids. My winged liner, thick mascara, and red lipstick were nothing in comparison.

“Where are you from?”

“California,” I spat. She paused with her lip-liner and glanced over at me with raised eyebrows. “Moscow,” I corrected.

“Ah.” She put the cap on her lip pencil and began brushing through her hair. I wanted to reach out and touch it, run my hands through it, because it looked like silk, ribbons of it, piling up and folding around each other. It was so much thicker than Victoria’s, and so much darker. But I just stared at her. She glanced at me, like I was a passing mirage, with a crooked smile. Like she knew that I was thinking about how beautiful she was. “Jeanne-Jacqueline Leroy. Nice to meet you.”

“Yuri,” I replied, spite on my lips.

“Call me JJ, Yuri,” she winked.

“JJ?” I scoffed. “Whatever you want, I guess.”

She stared at me for a little bit longer, her eyes like drills, before she grabbed her makeup bag and left the bathroom. I watched her walk and admired the conventional perfection of her body. Her waist was slim, her ass nice and round, her breasts beautifully sculpted and her face pristine. I imagined how unbelievable she probably was in a skirt and I hated myself for thinking that, but her ass was so nice and I didn’t think those sweatpants, surely the sweatpants she had slept in, tossing and turning during the night, did her justice. I hated her, though, despite the perfection of her body and her voice, because I didn’t like the tone in which she had introduced herself. As if it was blessing for me to know her name and be able to speak it.

Phichit showed me the room where my classes were. It was one of those really old-fashioned schools, where students stayed in the same classroom all day and the teachers were the ones who moved. I took a seat near the door for an inexplicable reason (maybe an unconscious desire to escape that would soon, of course, become very salient), and fiddled with my pencil while everyone else filed in. We all looked the same in our uniforms, but the differences appeared in the ways we did our hair and makeup. I was the only one wearing black socks. Some of the girls walked in and pulled their skirts down, or tied their wild hair up, or unrolled their sleeves, or stuffed their leather jackets into their desks. I observed, quiet, slouched in my seat and fiddling with a pencil Yuuri had bought for me. Imported from Japan, from her favorite stationery place and the only store from which she ever bought pencils or pens or notebooks or anything. She always claimed that if there was one thing she could bring from Japan over here, it would be that stationery store, so she could walk down the street when she was feeling uninspired and pick up an extra pencil. I didn’t understand it, but the pencil was nice enough and very accommodating.

As soon as the teacher waltzed in, books in hand, everybody fell silent and straightened up in their seats. All except me, I guess. Sitting up straight was never anything I’d been used to or found necessary, so I let myself lean forward on my elbows, put my cheek in my hand, trace my pencil around the desk with shoulders rounded. I hardly lifted my eyes when the tall, chubby, straight-backed and thin-lipped woman walked in and slammed the door behind her. I was thinking about the cat, which made me think about Phichit and Seung-ah, which made me blush and think about sex. I moved the pencil in circles.

Maybe JJ was at a reform school because she got caught having sex in the bathroom at her school, with one of those muscular, handsome boys with well-defined knuckles on his hands. She seduced him, of course, with a swish of hair, and he agreed to follow her to hell and back so that’s where she took him. She grabbed his hand, but not tightly, because that would’ve ruined her nails and made her palms sweaty, and led him to the girls’ bathroom on the third floor after school when nobody was around. The halls were eerily quiet and he, poised and intense and loved on the soccer field, was suddenly drowning in anxiety and strangled by his own nerves. He wanted her so badly and, despite being told his entire life that he was so handsome, he had never believed that she would allow him to have her. So he followed her the way a train follows the railroad tracks. She kept her thumb wedged between their palms so he couldn’t hold her hand too tightly. You know, the sweat.

A ruler, long and made of metal, slammed down against my desk. I jumped, lifted my arms, and glared up at the perpetrator with my teeth bared. It was the teacher that I’d barely noticed. She’d somehow slithered over to my desk while I’d been daydreaming about JJ and shocked me back into a reality with the _whip!_ of the ruler.

“Sit straight. Eyes forward, feet crossed, hair pulled back from your face,” she said, in her bold American English and harsh tone. She’d probably lived in the prohibition era in another life, and now felt out of place in this world and had had to take a job as a strict teacher at a reform school for girls so she could have a domain for her tyranny.

I narrowed my eyes and slouched again, spread my legs wide, and kept looking up at her. The class was snickering and I loved it, because I knew they weren’t snickering at me. They were snickering at her, because my disobedience bewildered her.

She forced me up to the front of the class and called up another girl, unfortunate enough to be sitting in the front row, to first tie my hair back. My hair was long and thin enough that she didn’t have too much trouble, but it was sloppy and I would have to fix it when I got back to my desk. It was uneven, hanging down over one ear while the other lay exposed. After that, the teacher (whose name is not even worth writing here) handed her the ruler and forced my arms out and told the girl to smack me three times on my palms, and three times on the backs of my hands. She held back tears while she did it, and I held my breath to keep my voice down and my flinches minimal. The girl tried to apologize to me but the teacher threatened to punish her, too.

When I sat back down at my seat, in spite of myself, I sat straight.

Each teacher was the same. They thought of themselves as the ruler of the classroom when they stepped inside, figured somehow that they had our useless bodies beneath their tacky kitten heels. This school had given them power when they’d said, Help these girls be better, and they were abusing that power. They picked on us, mocked us, yelled at us for things, rulers were their teaching method of choice and I think some of them even believed they were doing us some good. They’d trained themselves to be vigilant and their eyes reacted to us like hawks circling the earth, watching, waiting. Sitting at the same desk, class after class and abuser after abuser, was like slowly suffocating. Drowning, but you can see yourself sinking down and you can’t reach your own hand to pull yourself up to the surface because those tyrants had dug their fingernails into your ankles. They wanted to reform us by force, not by making us believe in the reform. I suddenly started noticing bruises, scratches, tears, short breaths and little habits. These girls had learned to tailor their behavior to each tyrant.

They were trying to break us, in the most literal sense, into proper society. I realized that after my first day and I vowed to desensitize myself to the pain so I could continue to defy them.

Lunch was chaos and I couldn’t find Phichit, Seung-ah, Lea, or Guanghong, so I sat by myself in an empty seat. There were other girls sitting at the table and suddenly it was a flashback to the high school I’d just gotten kicked out of. I ate my food quickly and tinkered with my phone. I took a selfie, posted it on Instagram to please all my new followers and show off my trashy ponytail, and then I watched a music video. It was for a song Yuuri had recommended to me a while back, and I figured now was as good a time as any to watch it.

There was a tap on my shoulder in the middle of the music video.

“What?” I said, angry, ripping the earbud from my ear. It was one of the girls at the table, a surprised look on her face at my hostile reaction. She was American.

“Sorry, it’s just...how are you doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Watching YouTube videos.”

“Oh.” I looked down at my phone. “You mean cuz of the censoring program?”

“Yeah. I haven’t seen a YouTube video in months, and it’s killing me. Did your phone glitch or something? Oh, you’re new. Maybe they haven’t installed it on your phone yet.”

“No, they have. I just hacked the system.”

The girls all gawked at me, then at each other, as if I had just told them the secret to world peace. They started scrambling for their phones.

“Do ours!”

It took me about ten minutes for the first girl’s phone. Eight for the next. Each time I did it I got faster. They thanked me profusely and asked if it was okay for them to tell their friends about me.

“As long as administration doesn’t hear, it’s fine,” I replied. “Oh, but tell them that from now on I need bubblegum and music recommendations as payment.”

I generally liked bubblegum—I wasn’t as into it as I would soon have the entire school believe, but I figured it would be funny to have them scrambling to find me some cheap bubblegum so that I would hack their phones. As for the music recommendations, I just wanted to surprise Yuuri by telling her about music she didn’t already know about at some point. It was bound to happen eventually.

“I also do laptops, but that’s an extra song and an extra pack of gum. And not that shitty mint kind—it has to be really sweet and colorful. Pink, preferably.”  

After lunch we were expected to return to our desks, so I got up and followed the crowd, hoping that I’d be able to retrace my steps. But as I walked along the corridor connecting the cafeteria with the building where classes were, I glanced out the window and there she was. Sitting there, looking up at me and swishing her tail, like she was just waiting for me. I froze, pressed my palm to the window and gazed down into the courtyard.

I turned and ran back the way I’d come, pushing my way through all the girls moving in the opposite direction. A few cursed me, but I could hardly hear. I went down the nearest flight of stairs, nearly throwing myself down in the process, and went out into the empty courtyard. She was still there. That stupid imaginary cat—no, she wasn’t imaginary. She was there. I stood at the courtyard entrance, catching my breath while my ponytail started to fall apart. She stared back at me, eyes knowing. This must have been at least her sixth life, maybe even her seventh. I took a cautious step forward, and she didn’t run away, so I took another. Another. I puckered my lips and made kissing sounds in an attempt to woo her, but she just sat there, motionless.

“I just wanna pet you, sweet girl,” I heard myself say. Hand reaching forward.

Suddenly there was another voice, coming from the other end of the courtyard. An older man’s. Yelling at me. You should be in class, young lady, what do you think you’re doing here, hey, stop!

He’d scared away the cat so I just ran in the opposite direction. I was slimmer and faster than him so I easily maneuvered beneath the archways, along the cobblestone paths, twirling around trimmed hedges and flowers. But I wouldn’t be able to run forever, and I didn’t know the school well enough to take any shortcuts or hide out anywhere. One of these days I’d run long enough and far enough that my feet would memorize this place.

There was a moment there that I thought I was dying. A moment in which a hand, as if shooting straight up from the ground, wrapped its smooth fingers around my waist and pulled my arm. My body followed, and I saw the ground coming to reach me and imagined my blood splattered everywhere.

But that same hand stopped me from falling.

Someone had pulled me into a small alcove, hidden beneath drooping vines and orange leaves. It was small and dark and the hand around my wrist was warm. Especially warm in this air.

I blinked and looked up at my savior. Her hand was still around my wrist, and I couldn’t see her face because she was busy peering around to see if the coast was clear. I shriveled in those shadows and couldn’t breathe.

“That should be good,” she said, and settled back into the alcove with me. Her English had the slightest accent. Of what, I wasn’t sure.

She was taller than me, but short by most standards. She was wearing a black leather jacket over her uniform, and her hair was short, black, and completely shaved on one side. Her piercings glimmered like crystals in these shadows—on her ears, eyebrow, nose, lips. Her eyes were soft beneath heavy eyelids, short eyebrows, and a forehead that looked like it had never seen a wrinkle. There was a weird, soothing stoicism in the way she leaned back against the stones and finally let go of my wrist. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. An aura around her drew me in, made my wrist ache and tremble. But the walls came up again and all I could express was anger.

“What the hell?” I said. She blinked at me.

“They’re persistent,” she replied, unfazed. “He would’ve gotten you eventually.”

“What are you even doing out here?”

“What are you doing out here?”

I scrunched up my nose. She wouldn’t let me have this, I could see. And not for any particular reason, just because that’s the way she was. I could tell.

“Yuri, right?”

My surprise silenced me. Languidly, she pulled out her phone, pressed a few buttons, and showed me my own Instagram profile. The one that had blown up overnight. She was, apparently, a follower.

“Becca,” she said.

“Becca?” I snickered. “Sounds like a real white name for someone who doesn’t look white.”

Maybe it was the light playing tricks on me, but I almost saw her crack a smile. Without warning, she lifted up the hem of her sweater to reveal her bare stomach. There was a tattoo of a flag I couldn’t recognize. It had a beautiful design of lines and patterns, then the image of an eagle with a sun on its back.

“It’s Otabek,” she said. “[Я из Казахстана.](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%AF%20%D0%B8%D0%B7%20%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%85%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0.)”

“Isn’t that a guy’s name?”

“Isn’t Yuri a guy’s name?”

“Not in Japanese.”

“But you’re not Japanese, white girl.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said. She blinked calmly, smoothly, and in my head she was smiling, even though out here her stoicism remained.

“You’re gonna get in trouble if you go to class late,” she said after a moment of silence.

“I should probably get used to that.” I showed her my hands, red and swollen on both sides.

“You’re quick.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“Come with me.”

She grabbed my wrist again and, after making sure the coast was clear, pulled me after her out of the alcove. Beneath the sunlight her skin looked like gold and the way I must have been staring was not okay. Her back stretched out like an endless desert swallowing the earth, her fingers pressing like irons in my quivering wrist. I let myself be pulled along. Train on the tracks. She had had time here. Her mind knew this place. She maneuvered through the outdoor labyrinth of this school until we found ourselves in the parking lot outside of the administrative building where Yakov had first brought us. Finally, outside of the building’s bubble, I spoke.

“Where are we even going?”

She took a moment to turn and look at me over her shoulder, and lightning bolts shot out from her eyes right into mine.

“Have you ever ridden a motorcycle, Yuri?” 


	11. 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the longer wait! i am in the process of moving to a new apartment to start medical school (!!!!!) and have no internet so i am now at a starbucks uploading this chapter for you to enjoy <3 
> 
> scroll over Russian for the translation!!
> 
> xoxo

**11**

Victoria’s fingers were most beautiful when they moved. When she had her hands on the countertops, or sitting in her lap, or resting on the dog’s head, they were fine. Pale, slender, long. But their beauty became astounding when they moved. She caressed Yuuri’s cheek in her hand, and her thumb moved from her temple down to the inner corner of her eye with wing-like grace. Colors seeped from her fingertip onto Yuuri’s skin and crystal rivers appeared in each spot Victoria had touched. Her fingers spread out and cupped the universe, moved and swayed like millions and millions of blades of rippling grass, while her fingernails erupted in solid, glossy sheets of colored ice. I used to sneak into theaters to watch ballet when I was a little girl in Moscow, and her fingers were like the dancers twirling and leaping and making the entire world shake from their throne up on that stage. Yuuri felt it too, I’m sure. In the middle of the day, I came home from the school to find the two of them in the living room. Yuuri was sprawled on the couch, asleep, and Victoria was crouched on the ground beside her. Very much awake, but very quiet, subdued. She leaned her cheek against the couch while her fingers moved along Yuuri’s skin, moved up and were tangled in her hair. I got lost watching them. Creating constellations, stirring oceans like a cup of coffee. She kissed Yuuri’s parted, sleeping lips and her fingers were beautiful.

I don’t know why, but I was thinking of Victoria’s fingers as Otabek, hand on my wrist, led me swiftly through the parking lot to the edge of the woods. She moved with purpose and I let her move me with purpose, too. We disappeared into the trees, and I turned my face up to the orange-brown-yellow-canopied sky. I didn’t want to see how she moved to get me where we were going, I just wanted to feel the way she pulled me behind her, so I looked up. Thinking of Victoria’s fingers.

We stopped. We were at the edge of the woods now. I could see a fence, and past it, a narrow road. We were at the very outskirts of this school, the kingdom of these tyrants. Hidden beneath piles of leaves at the base of a tree was a black, scratched-up motorcycle and helmet. I stood, unsure of what to say, what to do, how to move, while she brushed the leaves aside and stood the motorcycle up. I’d never seen a motorcycle up close and it seemed too big to be real. I felt as if I shouldn’t have been there, and I tried to recall what exact events had gotten me to that point and all I could see was the cat and Otabek’s gem-like piercings.  

She moved as if this was absolutely natural. As if she’d been waiting for me, expecting me to at one point be standing next to her while she cleared away the leaves of her motorcycle with mechanical precision. She’d read somewhere: a young girl with blonde hair, green eyes, and a scowl will need your help. You will take her into the woods, where you’ve been hiding your motorcycle, and you will whisk her away from this place. That’s how she moved. When she picked up a black helmet and turned to me, I finally found my defiant little voice.

“What is this even doing out here?” I demanded.

“I snuck it in. Sometimes I need to get away. And they’re like prison guards,” she replied smoothly.

“How has literally nobody caught you?”

“I’m clever about it.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, so I just narrowed my eyes. She took a step closer and held out the helmet for me. I almost expected her to reach up and pull the rubberband out of my hair, to let it fall from its cell of a ponytail, but she didn’t. I would’ve smacked her if she had, but I still pictured it in my head. It was something Yuuri would write.

_And then the young girl with the dark, shaved head reached her fingers up. She wrapped them around Yuri’s ponytail and smoothly, steadily pulled the rubberband out, and she watched with a keen glint in her eyes as the yellow sunlight waterfall poured down upon Yuri’s slouched shoulders._

“I don’t even know you,” was the thing I decided to say next. She blinked.

“Does it matter? Would you rather go back to class and get another beating?”

“I’ll just get one tomorrow.”

I paused. She paused. We let my words sink into the silence, totally bizarre and unnatural in my voice. Maybe she could tell, too, even though she couldn’t possibly know what kinds of words were natural in my voice.

I grabbed the helmet, took out my own ponytail, and put it on. She mounted the bike, turned it on, and then looked at me with those warm, stony eyes.

“Get on.”

“Wait, what about your helmet?”

“I don’t have an extra. I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Just trust me. Come on.”

She tilted her head toward the back of the motorcycle, and the only part of me that didn’t want to get on was that part that just reflexively resists everything. So I pushed it away because this was resistance, too. I battled between resisting this place, if only for an afternoon, and resisting whatever capacity I had to put aside my anger and let someone lead me. Even with Victoria and Yuuri, my common sense hardly ever won out against that stupid temper. Stupid, really stupid, truly and utterly stupid.   

I got on the back of the bike.

“Wait, what about the fence?”

“There’s an opening over there. Just enjoy the ride.”

The motorcycle jolted forward and I pressed my palms down into the gap in the seat between me and Otabek to try and balance myself. The wild strands of my hair immediately began whipping around, irregular with the bumpy road and not-so-smooth ride. We weren’t moving terribly fast; we weren’t even out of the fence. But as we moved, I saw the opening in the fence she’d mentioned. We moved through it, and she said, “Hold on tight.”

The motorcycle took another jolt forward and we sped up, faster, faster, until we were on the road and we were flying. I pressed my palms harder into the seat and let the wind hold me. Suddenly I couldn’t hear anything but the motorcycle, but the world rushing past me like a movie being fast-forwarded. But there was strange, ethereal stillness here, on the back of a motorcycle riding down a smooth, rural New England road. We were moving, but we were completely still, held in place by the very same forces that moved us, pushed us, gave us wings to fly and hover. I stared up at the sky as my hair stung my skin like a thousand little whips and everything just passed by. I couldn’t tell if there were birds, planes, clouds. It all blurred together and I stared up as if into nothing.

I don’t know how long we rode for, but after a while Otabek began to slow down. We’d reached some semblance of civilization—a gas station, a diner, a dingy motel. She pulled into the parking lot of the diner, got off the motorcycle, and reached her hand out to help me down. I let her. I planted my feet on the pavement and my body felt heavy and off-balance. I took off my helmet and handed it to her. My hair was wild, and had fallen back to its natural part on the left side of my head. She tilted her head toward the diner—retro, older, but clean and classy looking.

“I just had lunch,” I said as I clumsily followed her.

“They have really good coffee.”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“A milkshake, then.”

She turned over her shoulder and gave me a look. I’m not sure what kind of look, but it was nice and I liked it, so I decided internally that I would get a milkshake with extra whip cream and a maraschino cherry.

There weren’t many people in the diner, probably because it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday. The booths were shiny and red, the tables all looked the same, the countertop facing the kitchen was silver, and there was an old jukebox in the far corner. Warmth greeted us when we walked in, and it was only then that I realized I’d had goosebumps and was shivering. As we strolled in, Otabek took off her jacket and slid into the nearest booth. I, neither as gracefully nor as comfortably, slid into the opposite side.

Silence fell over us like a blanket as I slouched into the seat. My eyes were darting, shifting, both tired and wide awake. Otabek sat with her arms crossed against her chest, facing me so directly, so straightforwardly, but I didn’t shrink from it. It seemed to straighten my back a little bit, the way that a ruler would never be able to. I met her eyes—why the hell does everyone have to be so much taller than me?—and saw her about to speak, lips parted to reveal the white shimmer of her two front teeth, before the waitress approached us. She was older, maybe around Yuuri’s age. She had long brown hair, the color of caramel, deep violet eyes, her movements were graceful and entrancing. But her expression was almost angry. Thick brow furrowed, lips pouting. She put a hand on her cocked hip and smirked down at us.

“Skipping again?” she said to Otabek. Otabek smiled up at her. “One of these days they’re gonna send you to jail.”

“They won’t send me to jail,” she replied smoothly.

“They’ll at least take your motorcycle. Oh, you brought a friend today.”

“We’re not friends,” I snapped. And as I said it, I saw something flash in Otabek’s eyes. They were dark, but when they flashed like that they became bursts of moonlight pushing through the clouds on a rainy night. Her lips closed, her arms tensed, but that was it. And that was enough. “Not yet,” I added quickly.  

“Well, all right. What can I get you?”

“Just a black coffee for me,” Otabek said. Quieter. The waitress looked at me then.

“Uh...strawberry milkshake?” I ventured. She started writing. “With extra whip cream and an extra maraschino cherry.”

“You got it, girl. I’ll be right out with those.”

She gave a grin, almost sarcastic, ironic in a weird way, and walked away.

“Italian,” Otabek said quietly.

“Italian? But this diner is so American.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Italians are weird. ”

I pursed my lips to hold in my laughter, and in an attempt to do something with my hands, started trying to push my hair out of my face. To no avail. The tangles from the motorcycle were too much, so in the end I just gave up. Otabek watched me unflinchingly and I felt it, and didn’t mind it.

_And the young girl with the dark, shaved head leaned forward, pressing her pale cheek against her pale palm. The look of calm, steely interest surprised Yuri, and made her wish that the jukebox were playing. If you’d asked her, she wouldn’t have been able to explain that to you._

“Thanks, I guess,” I finally blurted. She raised her eyebrows. “For getting me out of there.”

“No problem.”

“I was actually going to class, I swear. But I saw this cat—seriously, a cat!” I leaned forward on my arms. “I’ve seen her around. You haven’t seen her?”

“Her? How do you know?”

“Because...” My voice trailed off. I didn’t know how I knew. “Hmm. I don’t know.”

“You’re weird.”

“Shut up.”

“I like you.”

The declaration was so sudden and so unexpected that if I had taken a sip of water, I probably would have spit it out. I blinked at her. Wordlessly.

“Have you ever looked at someone and thought, I could connect with that person, if only I bought them a milkshake or something?” she asked. The waitress—whose name I later learned was Michelina and was, in fact, Italian—came over with Otabek’s coffee and my milkshake. Complete with three maraschino cherries. I leaped on it like a rabid dog and the immediate, harsh coldness of it was painful against my throat.

“No,” I replied.

She stirred her coffee. I wanted her to dip her finger into it. Then I would be feeling cold and she would be feeling hot at the same time.

“It’s strange, I know. I could kind of tell when I saw your Instagram page. Like, oh, she has this look on her face. We could probably be friends. And then I saw you running through the courtyard and I saw how ugly your ponytail looked.”

“You’re not good at this whole conversation thing, are you?”

“Why, are you?” She lifted her eyelids and I avoided her gaze. Sucked on the little maraschino cherry.

“I thought, you know, I’ve run through this courtyard enough times to know exactly what she’s feeling right now. I wonder if she wants to go on a motorcycle ride with me.”

“So you kidnapped me.”

She smiled into her coffee.

“Looks like we’re both kinda weird,” I mumbled.

“Exactly.”

We fell silent again and I tried to figure her out. Which was unfair of me, because she was being so blunt. So straightforward. She was trying to explain to me exactly what was going on in her head and that was so absurd to me that I wasn’t sure what to do. Does honesty warrant honesty in return? Was I supposed to tell her that this was the best milkshake I’d ever had, or that I was growing obsessed with her piercings, or that I liked the sound of her voice and the way she made me feel I could fly when I rode on the back of her motorcycle? It seemed like the right time to say something like that, but I couldn’t get the rock out of my throat to say it. I couldn’t make sense of her, despite the fact that she was doing everything she could to help me out. Opening herself up like a book and letting me read every word, and we’d hardly known each other for an hour.

I was terrified.

“Why were you in that courtyard to begin with?” I heard myself say.

“I was tired and I couldn’t stand it.”

“Stand what?”

“All of it. They look at you like all you’ve ever done is make mistakes, and the only way for you to be functional is to let them stomp on you. And I was tired of it.”

I sipped my milkshake.

“You sound like a veteran.”

“You don’t feel it yet?”

“No, I do.”

“Your hands are too small and delicate to be so red. [**Вы знаете**](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%92%D1%8B%20%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%3F)[?](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%92%D1%8B%20%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%3F)”

As I sipped, I lifted my right hand to look at it. Starting to swell. I’d hardly been here a day and the scars were already starting to show.

“[ **Да**](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%92%D1%8B%20%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%3F)[.](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%92%D1%8B%20%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%3F)”

“These people don’t understand us or listen to us.”

“Tyrants.”

“Right. And if we don’t find the people who understand us and listen to us, everything just goes wrong.”

“Maybe everything goes wrong anyway.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re more optimistic than I am.”

“That’s good, right?”

Otabek had been stirring her coffee without even drinking from it, and I was nearly halfway through my milkshake. I wanted her to keep talking. I liked the sound of her voice, and suddenly I was hearing her sing the same lullabies that Victoria sang to me. Maybe she knew them already—if she didn’t, I’d teach them to her. But I caught myself, held my wrists back and reminded myself how dangerous it was to imagine futures with people. I shut up like a clam again and Yuuri’s scars flashed in front of me, and the silence weighed down on my shoulders like drills, twisting down into my bones and making my body rattle. While my eyes followed her fingers grasping the spoon to stir the coffee, even though she hadn’t put cream or sugar in.

Suddenly, my phone started to vibrate. It was Victoria. She should’ve been at work. Her fingers were probably rushed and harsh as she pressed the keys on her phone to call me--that Yurotchka, she’d say, wagging those fingers as Yuuri poured a glass of wine, can’t stay out of trouble for a single day. I put my phone on silent and placed it face down on the table.

“Someone cares about you,” Otabek observed. I shrugged and stared out the window at the ugly view of the parking lot. “Do you not care about them?”

“Sure. But it doesn’t really matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because how much you care about someone doesn’t change whether you hurt them. You can care about someone more than anything and still break their heart.”

“You don’t think intentions matter?”

“Why should they? Whether you actually love someone means fuck all if you hurt them anyway. Hate them, love them, their heart’s still broken.”

“It matters to you, though. Helps you sleep at night a little better if you know you care about someone and didn’t mean to break their heart.”

“No. Not really.”

My milkshake was almost done, and I was starting to make gross noises with the straw. Desperate sounds of my lips trying to suck up the last bit of strawberry. Michelina came back with the check. I realized I didn’t have my wallet.

“I was gonna pick it up anyway,” Otabek said, handing Michelina a wrinkled ten. I glared at her, and she didn’t seem surprised to receive such hostility.

“You know buying someone a milkshake and helping them play hookey isn’t enough to get them to care about you, right?”

“I know.” She stood up without having touched her coffee and put her jacket back on. “But it’s a start, isn’t it? Let’s go, before they send out a search party.”

I stared at her back for a few moments, my neck craned, before I stood up and followed her out. Bewildered, confused, and on the verge of tears.         


	12. 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scroll over Russian for translation!
> 
> xoxo

12

We came back just the way we came, and Otabek still refused to wear the helmet. And I don’t think she was doing it in any weird attempt to woo me, or make me like her—that was the worst part of it all. I think she was doing it because she genuinely wanted to, and couldn’t have cared less about what I thought. I appreciated that selfishness. I let myself float back into the nothingness of the sky and the earth colliding as we rode back (I could so get used to this, maybe not the part where my hair gets all fucked up, but I could really get used to this) and pressed my palms hard into the seat. I saw her waist, and part of me wanted to grab it, but I knew that’s what she wanted and what she was expecting so I didn’t.

When we got back to the school grounds, I stood and watched her cover her motorcycle with leaves again.

“One of these days someone is gonna find it,” I said.

“Probably. But until then this is where it’ll go.”

“Don’t you ever get worried that a squirrel is gonna take a shit on it or something?”

She snorted, and then said, “Absolutely.”

There was a rhythm when we talked, the two different cadences in our voices coming together to make what I imagined was like a rad rock song. I was the harsh part, the big intense dramatic parts where the singer slides around on stage and then breaks her guitar; she was the quieter parts, the ballads, the Jimmy Page guitar solos and Hotel California elegies. Something was natural in our conversations, like even the silences were meaningful because we were silent silently, silent happily, silent comfortably, not awkwardly. She didn’t expect me to fill the silences and I didn’t expect her to fill the silences, so those quiet moments became moments of understanding and strange, too-hasty connections.

It was a lot to be feeling as we walked back to the parking lot, I half a step behind her, but as much as I tried to tell myself I was being delusional I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling she’d been talking about earlier. She’d planted it in my head: of seeing someone and thinking hey, maybe we could connect. Or maybe we couldn’t, and we’ll fuck up and our relationship will crash and burn. It was a clash.

“Classes should be over soon. No point going back now,” she said after we’d snuck back into one of the courtyards. I nodded, but we walked toward the academic building anyway. “I’ll probably head back to my room.”

“You don’t have group therapy or anything?”

“I have a meeting with my advisor scheduled.”

“Oh, fuck,” I hissed under my breath.

“What?”

“My advisor’s gonna murder me.”

“Who?”

“Lilia what’s-her-face.”

“Baranovskaya.”

“Yeah.”

“I heard she’s ruthless.”

“I know. And I’ve only met her once.”

“Rip the bandaid off and go see her yourself.”

I gawked at Otabek, but she was staring straight forward as she walked, hands in her leather pockets.

“You’re telling me to walk into hell of my own free will?”

“It’s not hell. Advisors here are like godsends,” Otabek argued. “At least, some of them. They’re not like the teachers. They actually try to understand, you know? Most of them are here because they care. The teachers are here because the government put them here.”

“Still.”

“Up to you. But that’s what I would do.”

She held me back when we were about to walk in, checking her phone. There were five minutes before the next class period ended, so we could sneak in then. She to her room, and me to wherever. As we stood, I whisked her phone from her fingers.

“Wha—?”

“Just shut up a second. You’ll thank me.”

I hacked the system on her phone and handed it back to her.

“For you, free of charge. Consider us even now.”

She stared at her phone, and then her lips turned up into a calm, gentle smile.

“Whoa.”

“Spread the word. But if anybody wants my help, they’ll need to bring me a packet of pink bubblegum and a song recommendation.”

She brought her face up to smile at me, and I think I smiled back. I must have. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something drastic like that, but I smiled back at her because she’d let me ride her motorcycle and sacrificed her helmet and if we had crashed for some reason I would’ve survived and she probably would have died and now she was looking really nice in this light and she wanted to be my friend anyway so why shouldn’t I smile at her?

“I put my number in, too,” I mumbled.

“Awesome. We should hang out again.”

Imagining futures with people was dangerous, but I was doing it anyway, because the glint in her eyes invited me to.

“Yeah. I’ll be around.”

We parted ways, and I decided I would go straight to Lilia’s office.  

 

* * *

 

She told me to sit down in a chair—it was ready even before I walked in. I opened my mouth to speak, but she lifted a hand to silence me before I got the chance. Her finger moved like a wave, pointed to the chair, and her thin lips were tight and brown lipstick dark. I sat and found myself staring unwillingly at my reflection. She’d positioned a large, clean mirror in front of the chair, the kind that lets you see yourself way too damn clearly. My sunflower hair fell in knots around my flushed face, paper-pale but for my blotchy cheeks. Wrinkles spread out across my forehead, the corners of my eyes and lips. Their corners turned down like the ends of a banana in perpetual and inexplicable, numbing rage. At everything and nothing. My eyeliner was smudged and my lipstick faded. An angry ghost with knotting hair and a lot of things haunting her. She was really fucking ugly.

As soon as I sat down, Lilia came up behind me. She grabbed clumps of my hair and examined them like dead rats in the sink of her kitchen. I slouched a bit in that chair.

“Show me your hands, Yuri.”

I lifted my hands. The redness was vivid in my reflection, almost more so than in reality.

“Foolish,” she hissed.

“I didn’t wanna tie my fucking hair back, okay?”

“I wasn’t talking about you. And watch your tongue.”

My hands curled into my lap as she went back to her desk, every step more decisive than the last. I watched her reflection. She bent to grab something, bent at the waist like a doll, and the precision and grace of her every move stunned me into envious stillness. She came back with a large hairbrush.

“While I brush your hair,” she said, in Russian, “you will explain to me why you missed all your afternoon classes.”

“I don’t—”

“Ah! I won’t hear it.”

She grabbed a section of my hair and brushed through it. With absolutely no tenderness. I’d seen Victoria brush Yuuri’s hair before. Her hair was shorter, thinner, a bit straighter than mine. And much darker. In the living room, at the kitchen table, in the bedroom, they set up their romantic makeshift salon. Yuuri always closed her eyes and smiled a smile that epitomized comfort and happiness in its purest form. Victoria told her stories and brushed her hair. Such gentleness in her hands, sending the muted messages of unconditional love through her fingertips buried in Yuuri’s hair. There was something very different on Lilia’s not-so-gentle fingertips, but I couldn’t decipher it. Not then. When my head jerked back and I gasped in pain, she just snapped at me to stay still, and the unapologetic iron in her voice controlled me.

I told her, honestly, that after I’d been punished that morning something in me had succumbed. I told her that I’d planned on going to class after lunch like a good little girl, and then I told her about the cat and watched her sharp eyebrows go up. I lied and said I had decided to just stay in the courtyard, and I left out the part about demanding bubblegum for hacking people’s phones. She probably knew I was lying about the courtyard, but she let me lie and I was glad.

When she’d thoroughly brushed through every strand, undone every windswept tangle, she put her hands on my shoulders and stared at me, hard, in the mirror.

“You have a lot of fire,” she said, “and that frightens people. So they hit you.”

“What am I supposed to do? Smother it?”

She shook her head.

“No. But you learn to channel it in productive, meaningful ways. Useless defiance is dangerous.”

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

“They’re trying to erase the rawness of your emotions, so you can be good and proper. That is not my job.”

I was confused. There seemed to be some pretty bad disconnect in this place.

“I’m trying to teach you how to use that rawness. How to take it and polish it in the most beautiful way.” She smiled wryly and squeezed my shoulders. “Trying to put out such wild fires is dangerous.”

“Seems to me like you’re just delusional.”

Then she smacked my head lightly and it surprised me and shut me up.

“One step at a time. For now, tell me this: do you know how to braid your hair? You must start keeping it—as beautiful as it is—out of your face during classes.”

I shook my head.

For the next thirty minutes, Lilia taught me how to braid my hair. She did it herself, first, talking me through every movement of her fingers. I was mesmerized by it. One strand over the other, tightening it, then the next in a graceful, endless cycle. Like a painting, or a piece of embroidery, each little movement working together to make something really beautiful. She braided my bangs back tight against my head, around the side of my scalp, and then tied my hair into a ponytail. When she was done, she asked if I was ready to try, and then took it out and told me to do it. I did, not nearly as well as her, and I got so frustrated that I kicked the chair and she forced me back down with her palms against my shoulders. Stay patient, she told me, stay patient and focus on your fingers in the mirror. It’ll take practice before it looks as good as mine, but if you do it every day then you’ll be able to do it, and soon, you’ll see, soon the other girls in your class will be asking you to braid their hair. Do you want to learn a full French braid, too? They’re very good for days when your ponytail just looks atrocious. So she taught me how to do the French braid, too.

“When you’re alone, or socializing, you can do your hair how you like. But in class, make sure it’s out of your face. Take the time in the morning to braid it. All right?”

I nodded as I stood in the doorway.

“Now go do your work. Tomorrow you have a group session. Come back to see me on Friday. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl.”

She shooed me out, and I left. Alone, with a gorgeous braid falling over my shoulder, back to my room.

Phichit wasn’t there when I walked into my room, kicked off my loafers, and sat down on my bed with my skin chilled and numb with the cold, the anger, the strange calmness Lilia had managed to braid into me. I sat, silent, still, for a few minutes, staring straight ahead at the photographs on Phichit’s wall. Then my phone rang. It was Yuuri.

“[Здравствуйте](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%97%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D1%83%D0%B9%D1%82%D0%B5). You’ve reached the cell phone of Yuri Plisetsky. She’s currently not available to take your call, as she is busy fucking up literally everything and screaming at the sky. At the tone, please record your message.”

“We got a call from Yakov earlier.”

“BEEP.”

“He told us that you didn’t go to class at all in the afternoon.”

“If you are satisfied with your message, hang up. For more options, press the hashtag button.”

“It’s called pound.”

“BEEP.”

“Yuri-chan.”

“I’m coping, all right?”

“You couldn’t have waited at least a week before getting into trouble?”

“Nope.”

“Listen, we know you’re just starting to adjust, but at least make an effort there. We’re not asking you for anything wild, are we? We’re not asking you to do the impossible?”

“I mean, relatively—”

“Yuri.”

“No.”

“If you’re having trouble, reach out to Yakov. He wants to help you. And I know he mentioned that sometimes the teachers can be strict—”

“They hit us.”  

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“Nothing.”

“All right, well. Victoria and I disagree a bit on this...but I think you should just try as best as you can to fit in. Society isn’t going to get more accepting or any nicer after you get out, and next time you act up it’ll mean something much more sinister than just reform school. I’m not saying don’t be angry, I’m saying—”

“Don’t show it.”

“Yuri-chan...”

“How’s your vitamin water?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Where’s Victoria?”

“Cooking dinner.”

“Let me talk to her.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Force her. You’re good at that.”

“She really doesn’t want to.”

“Tell her that I’m gonna throw my phone at the wall if she doesn’t talk to me.”

A sigh. Silence. Then Victoria’s voice.

“[Мне нечего вам сказать прямо сейчас.](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%9C%D0%BD%D0%B5%20%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BE%20%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BC%20%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%BC%D0%BE%20%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81.)”

“I just want to let you know that whatever you’re expecting of me isn’t gonna happen. Just accept it now, because all I’ll be able to do is disappoint you.”

Silence.

“I’m too fucked up, and a place like this isn’t going to fix me.”

“We’re not trying to _fix_ you. We’re trying to help you.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it absolutely is not.”

“Okay, then help me what? Let boys get away with being horrible to me? Sit up straight in my seat? Learn to bite my tongue when someone fucking _hits_ me?”

“Who hit you?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yurotchka.”

“I said it doesn’t fucking matter. [**Увидимся**](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%A3%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D1%81%D1%8F.)[.](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%A3%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D1%81%D1%8F.)”

“Wai—”

I hung up. They called me back once, twice, maybe ten times, but I ignored them every time without actually turning my phone off. I grabbed _babushka_ , opened my laptop, and recorded a video diary. I broke down in the middle and sobbed into my webcam—thankfully, by the time Phichit came back, my eyes weren’t red anymore and I’d washed my face. He gushed over my braid, and then asked if he could take a picture. I said yes, but only of the back of my head. I didn’t want him to photograph my face just then. He agreed with a smile and I turned my back to him and heard the click of the camera. Then I was suddenly thinking about Otabek, and the way the back of her head looked on the motorcycle, and later that night she texted me with music recommendations—music I already knew, from Yuuri, but that wasn’t really the point.       


	13. 13

**13**

My braid looked like shit when I tried to do it myself the next morning. I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom, rubberband between my freshly brushed teeth, and practiced what Lilia had taught me just yesterday. Whether it was because of my nerves or just how early it was, I wasn’t sure, but my fingers just wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do. The girl, the gorgeous one who’d introduced herself as JJ, noticed. She silently strolled in, went into one of the stalls and blessed my ears with the sound of her pissing, then came back out to wash her face and brush her teeth. I held in my frustration because she kept throwing glances at my reflection, a smirk pulling at the corner of her gorgeous morning lips. When she was finished brushing her teeth, she started to imitate me—she braided her hair, starting with her bangs, working around her head, and then pulling it back into a ponytail that spread across her back in unfairly black strands. She did in two minutes what I’d been struggling to do for fifteen. Without a word, she winked at my reflection, flipped her ponytail, and walked out, and it took every ounce of willpower inside me not to reach out and pull that stupid ponytail.

I made it through about two hours of classes before I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer and pissed off one of the tyrants. This one smacked me herself, hard, on hands that were still tingling from yesterday. Tears stung my eyes but my pride, a weapon I’d often cursed, finally came in handy, and I swallowed them back. I wasn’t sure how many days of this my skin would be able to handle before sliding off my bones, but I was even less sure about how I was going to get myself to act the way these people wanted me to. Numbing my anger and frustration, erasing vulgarity from my tongue, sitting straight and nodding when they looked at me. Maybe I was just going to have to settle for sticking my middle finger up when they turned their backs to us, and savoring the snorts and held-in giggles of the girls around me.

When we were dismissed for lunch, I discreetly checked my phone from my desk, though my quivering fingers could hardly navigate. The text message from Otabek, shimmering up at me, initially made me feel absurd elation. A part of me, one that I’d forced into silence, had been hoping for this since I’d given her my number. That pride, the same one that had been my ally only that morning, was my enemy when it came to things like this—I would have rather taken another beating than text her first. So seeing her message was a breath of fresh air, the kind that a seagull might breathe in soaring over the ocean. Another part of me was confused and reserved, hoping, desperately, so desperately, that this time—just this once, just this one fucking time—there weren’t ulterior motives.

Wanna grab lunch?

I was as blunt as I could be.

Sure

She described where to meet her. I worked my way through the throngs of people and, somehow, ran into Phichit. Seung-ah was on his heels, and her cheeks were red and she was staring at her feet. He asked if I wanted to sit with them. I said no. Not today. He shrugged, his smile half-hearted this time, and let me wander around the cafeteria trying to catch a glimpse of the gems that embellished Otabek’s face. I found her in the corner, huge headphones around her neck, laptop open. I dropped my tray down and, as soon as I did, she closed her laptop and looked at me.

“Hey,” I greeted.

“Hi.”

Neither of us smiled, and in the sullen silence I considered thanking her for inviting me to lunch. I didn’t.

“What, you don’t have any friends of your own to sit with?” I said.

“Not really. I don’t get along that well with people,” she shrugged. I blinked at her, so she continued. “That’s why I asked if you wanted to have lunch. You’re the same way, right?”

“I mean...”

“That’s why we should be friends.”

“You’re really serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Do you not want friends?”

I bit my lower lip and started picking at my food. She leaned her cheek against her palm, the same way she had at the diner yesterday, but the sensation of her watching me wasn’t uncomfortable. It was oddly soothing, like her gaze poured warmth over me and made the tension in my muscles relax a little bit. I kept repeating the word ‘friend’ in my head, in as many languages as I could, stressing each letter differently in some meager attempt to understand just what the word meant and why she kept saying it.

“Your braid looks terrible, by the way,” she said.

“Shut up,” I snapped. “I just learned how to do it yesterday.”

“I can tell.”

She smiled at me, and then I smiled back and my food started tasting a bit better.

“What are you listening to?” I asked.

“EDM.”

“Oh. Yuuri doesn’t listen to EDM that much.”

“Who’s Yuuri?”

I told her about Yuuri. A writer, a very melodramatic writer who took her inspiration from Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata and, more importantly, she always said, voice sharp and feminist, Fumiko Enchi. Otabek stopped me here to mention that she’d read Haruki Murakami, and I told her that Yuuri loved him, had a very different writing style, but loved him all the same. Yuuri was a writer, beautiful in different dimensions. Quiet and small and shy sometimes, with the sort of smile you see on the faces of middle school girls just learning how to be charming. Other times sensual and confident and dramatic, because she knew herself and the ways in which she could control those whose gazes were drawn to her. I told Otabek that she liked to take care of people, like an instinct, but she was okay with being taken care of—I told her that initially, I’d hated Yuuri. The ways she flinched beneath my anger infuriated me because there was no way for me to take advantage of someone who welcomed being taken advantage of.

I told her that Yuuri’s soul was made of music. All sorts of music. Her mother, she’d explained to me once, loved Japanese folk music, and had taken her to her first taiko show when she was four years old. Would sing her to sleep and tried to teach her how to play the shamisen, which she’d been horrible at. (She grew up in Japan, I clarified.) Her father, though, was an avid fan of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen. She’d learned English through rock music and had dreamed of learning the guitar. As it turned out, she was musically incompetent, despite the inherent musicality of her soul.

“All of my talent comes in writing, I guess.”

Otabek listened, hung on my every word. Yuuri explained to me the nuances of different types of music. How in one guitar solo, you can hear the guitarist’s entire life, see it being laid bare before you. In the vibrato of a soprano’s operatic voice you can see anguish, sorrow, or unattainable happiness. In the chords of a piano, major, minor, the arpeggios and the progressions, you can discover new parts of yourself and make your moments of sad idleness moments of ecstasy instead.

I watched rainbows light up Otabek’s eyes as she listened, and for the first time I felt like I wasn’t the only one hearing my voice. Even if it was just spewing nonsense. She nodded, her lips twitched into little amused smiles, and I saw her seeing me. It made me talk more and louder and with enthusiasm I thought I’d lost.

“So now I need to find music that she hasn’t heard so I can show her something new,” I said, “so that we’re even.”

“Sounds like you love her.”

I gave her a tight-lipped grin.

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“You’re really not sure? I feel like that’s something you can easily say yes or no to.”

“I don’t really know what love means, though. Maybe I do love her. I wouldn’t be the one to ask.”

“So weird.”

“All I know is that she taught me how to love music.”

“Well, here.”

Otabek handed me her headphones. It felt really different than when Yuuri handed me hers, with those knowing dark eyes. I don’t know how it was different, but it was. I grabbed them and put them over my head. She turned on the music. It was loud, with a strong bass, sounds like robots and technology, soundboards and keyboards and a beat I could really, genuinely feel. I watched her watch me, and I started to bob my head. We smiled at each other, and I said, “I like this.” Mockingly—I must’ve said it loudly, I couldn’t sense the volume in my voice anymore through the headphones—she cupped her hand around her ear. So I yelled, “I like this!” as loudly as I could.  

Her gaze flickered for a moment, and then there was a tap on my shoulder. I jumped, lowered her headphones, hasty and heart racing. When I turned, there were three girls standing in front of me. Shuffling their weight, fidgeting with their phones in their hands, red cheeks and anxious smiles. Someone might have believed, looking at them, that we really were just regular boarding school students, not delinquents.

“Sorry to bother you, but are you the one that can get around the phone app?”

“Yeah.”

She held her phone out with one hand. In her other hand was a packet of bubblegum.

“All right.” I grabbed both. I instantly threw a piece of bubblegum into my mouth and chewed it, obnoxious and dramatic. Sweet chemicals spread across my teeth. “Did you forget the other half of the fee?”

“You’ll get the song _after_ you fix my phone,” she threw back. I raised my eyebrows.

“Hmm. Fine.”

I fell into my role and leaned back in my chair, crossed my legs in their long black socks (not white, never white), and fiddled with her phone. After about two minutes it was done. I handed it back to her. She played with it, her face lit up, and she turned her attention back to me. That light returning to her eyes, the satisfaction, the gratitude, it made my chest rise.

“You rock,” she said. She told me her song recommendation. I wrote it on the back of my hand. The girl behind her came up next, with a separate packet of bubblegum, and then the next. A surge of powerful justice rushed through me and I wanted to see the looks on those tyrants’ faces if they knew that now, if we wanted to, we could watch as much porn as we wanted, listen to as many vulgar rap songs as we wanted, play as many games of Tetris during class as we wanted. They would have hit me really hard and I would’ve spit in their faces.

I turned back to Otabek, armed with three packets of bubblegum, and she was staring at me with her chin against her hand, palm hiding her lips, eyebrows up. I chewed my bubblegum just a little bit louder and stared back at her.

“Impressed?” I said.

“Absolutely.”

I offered her a piece of gum. She said, “I hate bubblegum,” and then took it and put it in her mouth.

I was restless all afternoon, waiting to go back to my room so I could listen to the new songs scrawled on the back of my hand. I suffered through afternoon classes, went out to the nearest courtyard during the break to listen to music and try to catch a glimpse of that cat again, and then suffered through ‘group therapy.’ That’s what they called it, but I’d seen enough therapists to know better. Every therapist that I had ever seen had grossly misunderstood me and I knew these therapists would be no different, with their yellow legal pads and fancy fountain pens and sharp, square glasses. But I suffered through it, I was quiet, I answered their questions and did what they told me to do, and then I went straight back to my room. Phichit wasn’t there. I pulled out my laptop and played the songs I’d been shown, on my stomach, toes against my pillow. They were good, not great, not terrible, but certainly not good enough to show to Yuuri. She probably knew them already, anyway.

For some reason, alone in that room, my thoughts drifted to Seung-ah. Of all people, I couldn’t figure out why her. I closed my eyes and saw her face turned toward the sky, arms around Phichit’s neck like silk ribbons. Her lips were shining and open and her voice was gushing out, breathy, desperate, inexperienced and amazed. She was feeling something her body wasn’t used to and it writhed. The blankets of eyelashes fluttered erratically, and her neck became wet with his tongue. Then she became unapologetically loud in her pleas and her face was somehow, all at once, serene and begging for something. Words jumbled. The beauty in her face, her hair matted to her temples, her body quivering, was unfair and jolting.  

I opened my eyes, rolled onto my back, and squeezed my thighs together and pressed my ass down against the mattress. I threw another piece of bubblegum into my mouth and blew a bubble so large that it popped all over the tip of my nose. My phone vibrated. I checked it. It was Otabek. Before I opened her message, I took a picture, bubblegum and all, and posted it. The number of followers was growing. It wasn’t a really substantive message, and maybe that’s why it made me feel for a moment that I was flying. Just a hey, what’s up.

Nothing. Sitting in my room.

Don’t you have homework?

Probably.

Your hands are gonna keep getting redder.

Yeah.

She told me to do my homework, so I took the terrifying risk of sitting at my desk and taking my books out. I stared at them blankly for a long time.

I’m terrible at math, I texted.

I’m terrible at history.

How can you be terrible at history? It’s just memorization.

You’re really mean.

I did my homework, only to break away every few moments to respond to Otabek’s casual, simple, so simple, messages. She told me the music I should listen to while I studied. Usually I listened to the instrumental music Yuuri recommended to me, but Otabek told me to listen to EDM. She really liked her EDM. As I turned up the music, I imagined she was listening to the same song, somewhere else on campus, trying to figure out history while I tried to figure out math. Maybe she was one of those people who didn’t notice when the bubblegum lost its flavor, and she was still chewing the same stick I’d given her at lunch, tasteless, molding to the shape of her teeth. I would probably have plenty to spare, so I’d give her another stick tomorrow.

Phichit came back around dinner, Seung-ah at his heels. Before I could even tell him that I wasn’t hungry, he dragged me to the cafeteria. I walked a step behind him, right next to Seung-ah. I glanced over at her. She was staring at her feet, was perpetually tucking a strand of hair behind her delicate little ear. Maybe she was looking at Phichit’s heels. She didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to her. If I touched her, got too close to her, if our arms brushed, my fantasies would disintegrate and she would become just another person—no longer the girl I had seen in the courtyard. Someone just as real to me as anybody else, and my mind would have to drift somewhere else in its moments of silence and darkness. What would happen if I told them that I’d seen them?

“I saw how you two were the other day. In the courtyard, holding each other tight, tasting each other. You thought you were alone. You weren’t. I saw you. I saw everything.”    

The world would most likely fall apart if I said anything like that.

So I walked silently, and sat silently, and ate silently while Phichit, Seung-ah, Guanghong, and Lea drifted away into their world of organic friendship and twisted pasts. A world I was only half-familiar with. My phone buzzed, and I checked it like a lifeline, and I realized that it had been a really, really long time since anybody had texted me.  I lifted my phone and took a quick selfie--my followers were probably wondering where I’d gone. 


	14. 14

**14**

After dinner and a few hours of ignoring Victoria and Yuuri’s calls, I went to the bathroom to practice braiding my hair. I wanted to try French tomorrow. I wanted Lilia to be impressed when I walked into her office. I wanted to see her smile at me.

“Don’t forget—lights out at eleven,” Phichit called after me.

As I spilled my bobby pins and hair ties onto the bathroom counter, I heard one of the showers (there were three for the fifteen or so students in the hall to share) turn on. The rushing water was kind of soothing. I grabbed my kinked hair and brushed through it and stared myself down in the mirror. Victoria always teased me for not taking good enough care of my hair—it could look like pure sunlight, Yurotchka, and instead it looks like the worn insides of a scarecrow. She was right. I hardly ever brushed it.

After I’d been slaving away for maybe two minutes, a voice soared up from the running shower and began to sing. I froze. She was singing, and it was beautiful, so slow and smooth and so so beautiful. It drove me into the arms of an imagined intimacy, and she could’ve been singing anything, and this rush of comfortable, honey-dipped sadness would’ve been exactly the same.

“Please tell me that this could be easy,” she sang, “I’m tired of waiting for permission to love...”

I felt like I’d heard the song before, but I couldn’t focus hard enough to decide where. The sweetness of her voice, its infinite artistic vibrations, captivated me and lifted me and made me see colors the way you do when you squeeze your eyes closed too tight for too long. As her voice got louder and more passionate, my curiosity consumed me and became a burning need to see her lips pouring out the words. On the tips of my bare toes, I crept toward the shower. I got just close enough to peer through the crack, holding my breath, biting my lip.

I only had to look for a second before I recognized her. I saw long, thick, wet black hair smoothed against her bronze back, like oil seeping into the ocean, and I knew instantly who it was. I went back to the mirror to listen and braid, hypnotized, thinking of her icy eyes fluttering closed beneath running-mascara-lashes as she purred out her song. Unfair, totally unfair, to be that gorgeous and sing like nothing I’d ever heard. I wanted Yuuri to hear her sing.

(Then again, she was here, in this place, so she couldn’t have been totally perfect. She was fucked up under that unreal face, behind those crystal eyes, she had to be.)

When the shower stopped, I was still trying to do my hair, and my fingers prickled with frustration. She was humming now, a tune I didn’t recognize but wished that I did, and in the next moment I heard the stall open. She walked past me, twisting her hair up into a towel, skin wet and shining and another towel wrapped around her torso. It just barely covered her hips, and in the mirror I sneaked a glance at the details of her thighs. She paused on her way out of the bathroom and glanced at me from the corner of her eye, and I was angry. I wasn’t even worth a full turn of her head. She smiled. I only saw half of the smile, only saw half of her lips curling up and shining out too dramatically, with too much confidence, forcing blood up to my cheeks and temples.

Then she left and I was alone in the steamy bathroom, struggling with my hair. She was struggling with something, too. She must have been. Maybe she was having memories about the boy she’d led to the bathroom, the one who had ultimately put her in here—he had escaped with nothing but a slap to the wrist, of course. But they had let him off, because he was captain of the football team and his teeth were even and perfect, and he had such a bright future ahead of him and certainly it was wrong to deprive him of that because a slutty girl had seduced him. Her parents weren’t talking to her, and his parents weren’t talking to her, either. The confidence in her smile was probably just a performance. She’d gotten good at performances. Maybe she was in theater—maybe she’d given her voice to the unappreciative high schoolers who were forced to attend her performances, and maybe her voice had changed their lives, but not enough to save her from this fate. Was there anything really strong enough to do that?

A supervisor walked past the bathroom at around 10:45 and told me to go back to my room immediately. I tried to point out that I still had fifteen minutes before lights out, but she insisted, her voice sharp and harsh. I stuck my middle finger out at her, but closed my bedroom door before she could do anything. Phichit was already asleep, desk organized and body curled up and pristine beneath the covers. He didn’t belong here. Maybe the only person who didn’t belong here—if being here meant we were fucked up.

I checked my phone when I got into bed, and there was a message from Yuuri. Telling me to sleep tight, wishing me good dreams, and begging me to call her tomorrow. Victoria and I are worried about you. We’re not mad. We just want to check on you.

Victoria was probably sleeping already, and Yuuri was awake and pacing and the dog was on the couch, and she was stressed enough that her hair was pulled back from her face, and her fingers were shaking just a little bit. She was staring at her phone screen, _willing_ from afar that I would message her back, and then after an hour her heart would break a little bit more and she’d give up and crawl into bed with Victoria; and Victoria, in her sleep, would wrap her arms around her and kiss her neck. She wouldn’t realize that Yuuri smelled like booze.

There was another message—from Otabek.

Hope your braid looks better tomorrow. Night.

I snickered to myself and texted back.

Hope your face looks better tomorrow.

I added the cute devil emoji, the purple one, for good measure.

 

* * *

 

Otabek and I had lunch again the next day. My braid did look better—she told me so. And after afternoon classes I went to see Lilia, and she praised me, but didn’t smile, and I realized I would have to work a little bit harder to earn that. She talked to me about my classes, and I told her that I was starting to get into my routine, but was still trying to get used to everything. To this prison under a façade of a nice reform school for girls.

“You will continue to behave, and you will continue to do your work,” she said to me. Sometimes she spoke in English, sometimes in Russian. “But do not let your soul break or your fire go out—there are rules you must follow, and there are rules you must break. I will teach you how to tell the difference.”

I had the audacity to ask her to speak to me just in Russian, because it reminded me of home, of Moscow, of pirozhkis, but she shook her head.

“You won’t always get what you want. You won’t always get to be comfortable.”

Still, sometimes she would slip, and break into Russian, and I would breathe a bit easier. I was still confused about the disconnect—about why she seemed to genuinely want to help me, but the tyrants in the classrooms seemed focused only on abusing their power. But I said nothing about to her. Not yet.

I finally called Yuuri later that night. But her words were slurring and she wasn’t speaking clearly. Victoria must have been at work, or out with Chris, or anywhere that wasn’t home. Apparently wine gets sweeter when you’re alone.

“Do you...do you have friends?” she asked.

“It’s a little soon. I hardly know anybody.”

“Make friends, Yuri-chan!”

“On the to-do list, don’t worry.”

“Victoria...Victoria’s worried about you.”

Her ‘you’ was long and drawn out and she sighed after she said it.

“I’m fine.”

“She says that you said some things the other day...she’s worried about you.”

“Really, I’m fine. I’m just getting used to it here. You know?”

“It’s hard, baby, it’s really hard.”

She never really called me baby. I didn’t mind it.

“You know to call us, right—call us if you need anything, anything at all.”

“I know.”

“We love you, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

I considered asking her about the song, from the shower, but I decided against it. I would find it myself.

I hung up and felt drained. I sat at my desk, staring at my open book blankly, and then I felt hollowly guilty for wishing Victoria had been there instead. I wanted to hear her voice, crystal clear, sometimes demeaning, sometimes comforting. I wanted her to tell me I was doing something wrong so that I could bite back at her.

I fell into some semblance of a routine. Otabek and I began spending more time together. First we had lunch together, every day, until I became accustomed to her presence and the sound of her voice and the idiosyncrasies of her face and hands. She was an oddly still, slow-moving person. Sometimes she wore sunglasses and put them up on her head, sometimes she wore those fingerless gloves, sometimes she wore killer winged eyeliner and sometimes she didn’t. She liked to lean her chin on her hand when she listened to my stories, and it always left a little red mark on her skin. She would rub it, but it never fully went away. When she put her chin in her hand like that and looked right into my eyes, I found the words spilling from my lips. In those first few weeks, we talked about every shallow topic we could think of, and I found that the look of complete and unconditional attention she gave me was something I had never experienced before. That wasn’t totally fair, actually—Victoria and Yuuri, especially sweet Yuuri, had given me that look before. I think the difference was that Otabek expected something from me when she gave me that look. She was waiting for me to tell her something, waiting because she genuinely wanted to hear it, to listen. Yuuri and Victoria had never put any expectations on me. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I loved them.

The more time we spent together, the more time we wanted to spend together. We dragged each other out of bed for breakfast, a meal neither of us used to eat, and we’d walk to class together, and sometimes we played hookey together to run around the courtyards. She knew them like the back of her gloveless hands and showed me all her tips and tricks. When she showed me the small alcove, I confessed to her that I had seen Phichit and Seung-ah there. She laughed, and said, “They’re cute together.” Before I knew it, we were spending hours together, sometimes my room, but usually hers, because she didn’t have a roommate. We listened to music and watched YouTube videos and gossiped about people that I didn’t know, and I found myself opening up and searching, deep inside, to learn myself so that I could teach her, too.

Her favorite color was black, and her favorite item of clothing was her sexy leather jacket (self-defined). When she showed it to me I agreed that, yes, definitely, it was sexy. She loved horror movies, but after showing me thirty minutes of _The Conjuring_ I decided that I definitely did not. Yuuri liked them, too, I told her, but Victoria was loath to set eyes on a horror movie. Beka’s favorite food was _zhauburek_ , which was just kebab, and she had tried to be vegetarian when she was ten and had gotten a rash from it. She loved rock and EDM, hated the American habit of blasting AC in every building regardless of the weather, had always dreamed of owning a horse but had settled for a motorcycle instead, pretended to like coffee to seem like more of an adult, secretly loved nail polish but only dark colors, spoke three languages fluently, and was a Scorpio. I learned that she had a temper and a wild competitiveness down inside, but was very good at keeping her cool, practically tricking people, and was a fucking dope poker player. Victoria had already taught me how to play, but Beka kicked my ass every time.

 

* * *

 

“Hold the cards like this, Yurotchka, so that I can’t see them.”

“I know that, stupid.”

“Good girl, there you go. Why don’t we use...bobby pins? They’ll be our chips.”

“Just so you know, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right then. Let’s make a bet. If you win, we’ll let you dye your hair.”

“Neon pink.”

“Neon pink.”

“And if I lose?”

“You have to walk Makkachin every day for the next two weeks.”

“You’re on, **баба.** ”

 

* * *

 

I didn’t see the cat for a really long time. I practically forgot about her, my mind torn between my schoolwork and Beka. She always reminded me to do my homework.

I earned myself a new nickname in the meantime: Tsarina Bubblegum. By the end of my first two weeks, I had compiled practically a lifetime’s supply of bubblegum, and had an entire playlist of new music. The teachers were starting to catch onto the fact that we were using our phones a lot more, but those who had given me their bubblegum, songs, phones, and laptops, were loyal. My name never escaped their lips, and the teachers could do nothing but whisper amongst themselves about how they needed to do something.

Once, when we were sitting in one of the courtyards despite the cold, and I was chewing bubblegum and trying to get the right angle for a decent picture, Beka stole the phone from my hands because she could hold it at a better angle. We took the photo, and she gave me my phone back.

“You’re really photogenic,” she said, echoing what Phichit had said to me once.

“It’s cuz Victoria taught me how to be vain.”

“Victoria. Yuuri’s wife, right?”

I told her about Victoria. A translator, with a love of socializing and learning other cultures and having her voice heard. One of those people who recognizes the goodness in themselves, and amplifies it and screams out about it to mask the bad things. I told her that she was very good with languages, very good at communicating most of the time, but sometimes she could say the first thing that was on her mind and crush the dreams and break the hearts of those around her. She was beautiful, I said. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, the most beautiful woman I would ever see, the type of woman who knew she was beautiful but never let herself fall into the pool of narcissism so common for such beautiful people. She wanted other people to think they were beautiful, too.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to Yuuri,” she said to me once.

I told her that Victoria was very Russian, in that she expected nothing less than the best from everyone around her, including those who couldn’t even expect the best from themselves. I told her that even when Victoria’s life was falling apart, even when she could hardly get out of bed in the morning, she used her words and the flips of her silver hair to support the people she cared about. She’d given me _babushka_ to help me, spoke to me in Russian, taught me hidden tips and tricks of makeup and sang to me despite the fact that she was not a singer. But she was horrible with promises, was too forgetful, was really vain and selfish and caught up in what others thought of her. Passive aggression was always on her lips, in the crinkles of her eyes when she smiled her menacing smile, and it was a weapon she’d used to protect me for a long time. She called me Yurotchka, and kitten, and brought me books to read because she was a very firm believer in the power of knowledge. So was Yuuri. One of their few similarities. 

“You definitely love both of them,” Beka said decisively. I blushed, and shrugged and asked her which filter I should use for the picture.         

I got used to hearing JJ singing in the shower, and I started looking forward to it. I told Beka about it, and once, when we were hanging out in my room, I heard the shower running and dragged her there with me. I covered my mouth to hold back my laughter as I saw her face twist into amazement.

_JJ?_ she mouthed, pointing to the bathroom stall. Notoriously flirtatious and narcissistic. I nodded. She raised her eyebrows, impressed, and amused, and we heard the shower door open and ran back to my room before she could see us.  

When we wanted to talk shit about people in our immediate vicinity, we slipped into Russian, and snickered under our breaths. I was a bad influence on her in that sense. She was too kind and gentle and supportive of other people, but I was a horrible gossip and I needed ways of channeling my negativity, so I pulled her into my badmouthing sessions.

 

* * *

 

I walked into the kitchen and Yuuri and Victoria were sitting, voices hushed, cheeks red and hiding tight, secretive smiles. I furrowed my brow and glared at them. Their voices went dead when they saw me.

“Please, don’t let me interrupt,” I said.

“We were talking about your teacher. The one we met at the parent teacher conference,” Victoria replied mischievously.

“Victoria!”

“What? She’s fifteen! She’s nasty even without our influence.”

I smirked and lifted myself up onto the counter, swinging my legs.

“He’s an ugly motherfucker, isn’t he?” I added. Yuuri opened her mouth to protest, but Victoria’s laugh drowned her out.

“And his clothes! My, it was so hard to not laugh right in his face!”

Victoria and I fell into a fit of laughter, and Yuuri snorted to hold back hers. She was always a better person than the two of us, always trying to be positive, trying to take the high road. But in the end she laughed with us, and we called him racist because he’d asked her what it was like in China. I’ve always wanted to visit China, he said to her, but I hear the pollution’s pretty bad.

* * *

 

I was in Beka’s room, scrolling through my phone with one hand while she painted the nails on my other. We were listening to Led Zeppelin because I’d forced her to put it on. I was in that kind of mood. It had been about three weeks since I’d arrived here, in hell, where I’d somehow found an angel that shared her wings with me. She’d wanted to do black, but I told her I was already pale enough, and to do light pink. My legs were sprawled out in her lap because I wanted to be annoying, and I was imitating the guitar solo to “Stairway to Heaven” because I knew I had a terrible voice.

“I don’t know how your hands are so soft,” she murmured. “You barely ever moisturize.”

“I’m all natural, baby.”

“What, Victoria never gave you lotion?”

“Of course she did. But I hated how icky it made me feel, especially when I put pants on.”

Beka snickered.

“Hey, Beka,” I said, my voice dropping. She kept painting my nails.

“What’s up?”

“You never actually told me why you’re here in the first place.”

“You never actually told _me_ why you’re here,” she said, unfazed.

“I asked you first!”

She smiled, and finally looked up at me.

“You’re, like, five,” she accused. I stuck my tongue out at her, and she stuck hers back out at me, then returned to painting my nails. There was a moment of silence, and I realized, by the fact that she was still smiling, by the fact that her lips were trembling, ever so slightly, it was so easy not to notice, that I had struck a nerve. I licked my own lips and put my phone down.

“I’m just kidding,” I said hastily. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I haven’t told anybody.”

“It’s probably a better story than mine. Wanna hear it?”

She nodded.

“This kid was harassing me on my way to school, so I punched him in the face. Then he made fun of Victoria and Yuuri, so I hacked into his computer and sent out pictures of him masturbating to the whole school.”

Beka was laughing so hard she had to stop painting for about a minute. I smiled, because it was actually the first time I had made her laugh so hard.


	15. 15

**15**

“They sent you across the country because you embarrassed some asshole?”

“I mean, it wasn’t the only reason,” I said with a smile. “I’d been getting in trouble for a while. Fights and stuff. And this kid was the son of a cop.”

“You’re kidding.”

I shook my head.

“I wish everyone had your guts,” Beka said. I blushed and waved my fingers.

“Keep going, so I don’t look ridiculous,” I demanded. She kept painting, and I watched her hide a smile and hold back laughter. I wanted to tell her more stories to make her smile. There were stories I didn’t know I wanted to tell, but now that there was somebody to listen, they kept rising up my throat and clawing their way out. She painted my nails with a precision that reminded me of Victoria’s. Except Victoria never looked as if she were trying so hard—that was what was so annoying about her in the first place. Everything looked effortless to her. I could see the knots in Beka’s jaw and the way she kept pausing to brush her hair out of her face.

“Will you at least tell me how long?” I asked quietly.

“I’ve been here a year and a half.”

“No wonder you’re so used to it.”

“You have to learn the rules so that you can break them.”

“Only some,” I said. “You don’t want to break the wrong rules.”

Beka’s eyes shifted up, and I pursed my lips in as coy a grin as I could manage.

“That’s what Lilia says, anyway.”

She looked at me a moment. And then, still stoic as ever, lifted my hand and planted a horrible, slobbery kiss there.

“Ew! Beka!”

We fell into a fit of laughter. The kind that I had never experienced before meeting her, but had now become like little flowers in my dry desert days. Sometimes we laughed about nothing. We just laughed to hear ourselves laugh, until our stomachs hurt and we were wiping useless, empty tears from our eyes.

She didn’t tell me that day why she was here.

 

* * *

 

A woman, with silver hair that falls over the edge of the pure white bed, lies on her back, naked. Though her features are soft, not a single wrinkle, not a single tense muscle, in her picturesque face, she stares at the ceiling with ocean eyes wide open. One of her arms, made of lace, lays across her bare, iridescent, stomach, and her other, made of thread, reaches out across the universe to caress the bed sheets between her fingers. Her legs are bent ever so slightly at the knees, and though she hasn’t shaved, the hair is so light, so fair, that it can hardly be seen against the pale backdrop of her thighs, her calves, her shins. It’s unclear whether her head is at the beginning or the end of the bed; the tips of her hair, stars dripping, trail against the carpet. She blinks and her eyelashes create tsunamis.

Another woman, with black hair blanketing her shoulders and dark, endless eyes telling a thousand stories, crawls onto the bed, slowly, thinking hard about every move she makes. Her hands on either side of the silver-haired woman’s body, one leg between her two bent ones, breasts hanging, teasing. The silver-haired woman’s eyes remain fixed to the ceiling, but she smiles, just a bit, and the death-like paleness of her cheeks becomes tinted red. The black-haired woman’s body moves like sand, back curved, toes and fingers digging into the bed while her lidded—both light and heavy—gaze scours the silver-haired woman’s sacrificial body. She leans down until the edges of her hair, thinner and darker and shorter than its silver counterpart, hover just above her collarbone. She breathes in, falls deeper into the bed, but the hair follows her, and suddenly the black-haired woman’s open, breathless lips touch her arched neck and she’s flying.

 

* * *

 

Early in the morning, before the tyrants that ran about the halls were really awake, I sneaked across the building from Beka’s room to mine. We’d lost track of time (though I can’t really say whether it was deliberate) and I’d ended up falling asleep on her bed. She’d taken the floor, and when she’d woken me up to warn me to get back to my room before anyone found out, I’d felt like shit for stealing her bed.

“It’s fine,” she’d said, pinching my nose. “Tsarina needs her beauty sleep.”

And I’d thought, looking up at her crusty eyes and dry lips and disheveled hair, this was what it must have been like to have real family.

I had to tiptoe around a few people patrolling, had to carry my loafers in my hands so that my socks covered the pattering of my feet in the halls, and it was unlucky how far our rooms were from each other. I managed to slip back into the room and take a deep breath, before I stripped and grabbed a towel and prepared to shower. Phichit was still asleep when I came in—by the time I got out of the shower, he was awake, brushing his hair, humming to himself, getting his books in order.

“Morning, Yuri,” he smiled. I smiled back, squeezed my wet yellow tangles in another towel. I’d learned quickly to be comfortable around him regardless of the situation. He wasn’t one to judge, so I wouldn’t dare let myself feel judged. Lilia had reminded me how important that was.

“Morning.”

“Spent the night at Otabek’s?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s really cool, huh? Everyone thinks so.”

“She’s all right,” I grinned.

“Said Tsarina Bubblegum.” He paused, and plucked a few stray hairs on his brows. “Your hands still look pretty rough.”

I glanced at them. The skin was bruised, never getting a chance to heal.

I was silent, and braided my hair. The French braids were best when my hair was wet, and I didn’t need a mirror. The French were the easiest. Then I got dressed, in my little black socks, and went to do my makeup in the mirror. JJ was there, but I didn’t say good morning, because she was the type of person who expected good mornings, and I was the type of person to deny people what they wanted, out of spite. She blinked at me, still wouldn’t turn to face me fully, and then finished applying her lipstick.

“Your braid looks better, _chérie_ ,” she purred as she left, grabbing my braid and then dropping it to my back again. I stared after her. Considered asking her to sing for me. Thought better of it. Finished my makeup.

When I walked back into the room to grab my bag, Phichit was at his desk, fiddling with his camera, focused. His head whipped up when I entered.

“Yuri. Can I take a picture?” he asked.

“What? Now? It’s, like, seven o’clock.” I put bubblegum in my mouth, even though I was about to go to breakfast.

“I know. That’s exactly why I want to take it.” He stood up. The warmth in his smile dissipated the winter chill that had been permeating the room—I was starting to shiver at night. “There are these little bags under your eyes, and your voice is kinda fried. Not that your voice can pop up in a photo, but, you know.”

“You’re saying you want to take a photo because I look tired?”

He nodded. The earnestness in his eyes always had a weird way of catching me off guard, so I shrugged.

“Where do you want me?”

He positioned me as if I were walking out the door, backpack slung over one shoulder. Stare at the ground, he said, as if your head is feeling heavy and you can’t fully lift it. Yes, there, like you’re rubbing your eye! Oh, but don’t really rub it, your eyeliner’s on point today. Perfect, Yuri, perfect. Ah, the braid! Blow a bubble with your gum, but don’t let it pop.

“Do you mind if I post it?” he asked when he’d gotten his photograph, pink bubble and all.

“Be my guest.”

“I’m giving you lots of followers, huh?” he winked. I smiled, then made my way to the cafeteria to meet Beka for breakfast. A few minutes later a notification popped up on my phone. phichit+chu tagged you in a photo. Captioned, “Tsarina Bubblegum off to rule the world. @RussianTiger0301.” For the very first time I wished that Victoria followed me on Instagram, so that she could see how pretty I looked. Even the girl whose face launched a thousand ships and whose voice singing “Non, je ne regrette rien” could transport me to Paris in the 1950s thought that, at the very least, my braid was pretty.

 

* * *

 

The woman, with her silver hair and those wet, sweet lips on her neck, closes her eyes. There is thirst, and vanilla, and beautiful intimacy on those lips, dotting her neck and forcing languid resignation into her veins. She hears herself breathe, and blinks her eyes open to watch her breaths swim up into infinity. The bed sheets start to wrinkle as her body moves, falls deeper, squeezes and curls. Black hair is spread out across her bare chest, covering her in lust, and the black-haired woman’s tongue pressed down into her neck. She can’t help but smile now, because her body is moving on its own and has taken it upon itself to feel that tongue, those lips, the strands of hair wrapping around it.

The other woman, lost in the taste of her neck, moves her hand until it presses to her cheek. She wants to feel close to her, the one with the silver hair, in more ways than just physical. She wants to feel everything about her, suck every bit of salt from her sweat, knot every strand of her hair and kiss and pull out every one of her butterfly-wing lashes. She lets her body flow down until her lips are there, on the woman’s open, soft, kiss-me-right-here breast. The pleasure of her tongue, spiraling around in drizzles of honey, sends the silver-haired woman into a deeper level of loss. There is loss in letting yourself love someone—a good loss, a pure loss, and the woman smiles and grasps the bed sheets and sighs out into the sky, and her lover smiles that honey smile and puts her thumb on the pleading tip of the woman’s tongue.

 

* * *

 

My hands got fresh bruises, because I refused to stop chewing gum. The teachers were starting to enjoy punishing me, because with each new way I found to disobey them, they found an excuse to exercise their power. At first I had annoyed them—a young girl with messy braids and a quick tongue, who had surely crushed people like them before and would want to continue doing so. A girl that was ripe, ready to be crushed, because she had never been crushed before, and someone had once said to them, “Crush these girls,” and they liked the rush of it and wanted to crush me. But they were bad at recognizing what it meant to be crushed—I’d been crushed, plenty of times, just not in the way that spawns obedience. We were all a little bit crushed. Some of us in more obvious ways than others.

Lilia told me to stop chewing gum in class.

“It’s unsightly and annoying,” she said. “And there’s no reason to break a rule like that.”

“It’s such a stupid, pointless rule,” I shot back. “I want to chew gum in class, why the hell can’t I?”

“Is that really what you want to spend your energy on?”

I looked her right in the eyes.

“I’ve learned how to braid my hair in ten different ways, I’ve finished almost all my assignments, I haven’t skipped class in a week—let me chew gum.”

She smiled, and reached out to pin back a stray strand of my hair.

“All right. You got me.”

It was the smile I’d been waiting for, and I felt like I was on top of the world for the rest of the day.

I decided to drag Beka to dinner with me, Phichit, Seung-ah, Lea, and Guanghong. Usually we would grab dinner ourselves, or sometimes she skipped dinner. I’d snuck food from the cafeteria to her room a few times, and when I’d asked her why she skipped dinner, she’d told me that being around that many people stressed her out sometimes. That was all I’d needed to hear. Really, I hadn’t needed to hear anything—I didn’t need her to justify anything to me, and she didn’t need me to justify anything to her, and that might have been why we went out of our way to justify everything to each other. When you don’t ask for it, you listen to it better. But sometimes Phichit managed to convince to have dinner with them, and I was quiet, and I’d come to find weird, performative intimacy with them. They had a web of friendship I couldn’t quite breach, but watched them weave, and it glistened beneath the synthetic too-bright cafeteria lights in beautiful silver rainbows. I thought Beka might like to see it.

We sat down, and I introduced her to everybody. They welcomed her with their beautiful, practiced smiles, which we all knew were hiding secrets. Guanghong probably knew Lea’s, Lea knew Guanghong’s—Phichit and Seung-ah certainly knew each other’s. They’d whispered them into dorm bed sheets and under decaying stone arches. I’d never run into them doing anything in our room, but it was bound to happen at some point. Beka smiled smoothly, suavely at them, and they all smiled back, and I was worried for a moment that they would weave her into their web in a way I never could be. But then Beka looked at me, and smiled the same way she’d smiled when I’d insulted her that first day in the courtyard, and I knew she’d stay by my side. It gave the tasteless food on my tray some flavor.

Seung-ah was reading a book spread out on the table. I imagined that underneath, her pinky was interlocked with Phichit, and they were getting butterflies like middle school students and thinking about the ways they’d kiss later.

“What are you reading?” Beka asked her.

“ _The Second Sex_ ,” she replied.

“Sounds fun,” I snorted.

“Fun isn’t the right word,” Seung-ah said bluntly. “Then again, I’m not really sure what other people consider ‘fun.’”

“She likes philosophy.” Phichit looked over at her and grinned, and she met his eyes, even though she never met any of our eyes.

“I wish I liked to read as much as Seung-ah. I feel so stupid whenever I’m around her,” Lea said.

“Stop that. You’re plenty smart.” Guanghong was always the first one to keep Lea on her feet. They fell into their usual conversations. Phichit and Lea gushing over social media, the most recent YouTube fads, Guanghong whispering in Lea’s ears while Seung-ah read her book with occasional, flickering glances—like the flames of a candle—toward Phichit’s sunlight face. Beka slid in with her attentive eyes, her encouraging smiles, the way she nodded whenever you said anything just to make sure you knew that she was still listening.

“Thanks for dragging me out,” she said to me. “I like your friends.”

“I don’t know if we’re really...friends,” I replied. “Bubblegum?”

“You know how much I hate bubblegum.”

She took a piece anyway, just like always, and started to chew.

 

* * *

 

As the woman, her silver hair rippling, lets her body move with her smooth sighs, her lover puts her lips right in between her breasts. In that vast, lush valley where she traces a path with her tongue, lapping up the love spread out in flower petals there. As she kisses her chest, she reaches her hands out, spreads them along the woman’s arms, wrap around them and press them against the bed sheets. Her fingers curl and then open and then are warm and inviting when her lover grasps them in her own. Their fingers play together like childhood friends, jumping, swaying, enamored with each other in ways they can’t articulate. While the woman with the black hair, waving out, covering the silver-haired woman breasts, kisses her chest, her stomach, breathes her own soul out into her belly button so that they could share it together. One soul for the two of them, in that moment—later they can be two souls.  

The woman’s neck arches back, as if weighed down by her smile, tilting with pleasure and shimmering with desire. She wants a hand around her open neck, wants fingers tracing her silk lips, wants her lover’s tongue to map out every inch of her body, until her skin has dissolved like cotton candy. Sweet, sugary, fleeting. Her lover, with the black hair, is experienced. She knows where she is and where she wants to go—where she wants to take the silver-haired woman. How she wants her to sigh and say her name and the ways in which her body deserves to twist and turn and destroy the sheets. She kisses her lower, and puts her palms against the woman’s hips. The woman claws at the bed sheets in anticipation and lets her legs fall open—leaves falling from a tree in autumn. Her lover kisses her there, reaches out her tongue, to taste the rose petals and mazurkas and Chanel perfume in her pussy. The woman’s voice spills out, unashamed, endless, the voice of total and utter sacrifice, as the pleasure spreads out from the tip of her lover’s tongue, up through her body, and into the tingles of her lace limbs. She says her lover’s name until it seems to have lost meaning in her voice. Her body moves, of its own accord, while her soul feels the ecstasies of an intimacy that so few in this life will ever experience. 


	16. 16

**16**

I had broken down a few times in front of Yuuri and Victoria, but they had been the only ones. In my past homes, my past lives, I had done an extraordinary job of hiding all the ugliness, the sourness, all of the things that made my fists clench and my tongue resort to sword-tip sharpness. It had been easy to hide, because those others, the ones who’d convinced themselves that they wanted to help people for the sake of helping (what a lie, what a horrible, hilarious lie), hadn’t been trying to see it. When you want a pretty little gift wrapped in beautiful paper, all tied up with a silk bow like scarecrow hair, you work really fucking hard to ignore just how battered and broken everything inside the box is. They had been so desperate to tie the bow, their fingers were _aching_ trying to do it, I hadn’t even needed to try to hide it all. But Yuuri and Victoria—they’d torn through the wrapping, even when I begged them not to. Not all of it. So I’d broken down in front of them.

Once, one week after I’d moved in, and my knuckles had been scarred from decking some kid in the face at my new school.

Victoria had pulled my head into her lap. I’d yelled at her and scratched at her that I didn’t want it, I didn’t want her to touch me, but she had ignored me. Sung her lullaby, stroked my hair, until the tears seeping into her thighs had dried.

Another time, on my fifteenth birthday. Yuuri had bought me very expensive headphones, told me that she wanted me to be able to experience music the way it was meant to be experienced. Something about the headphones had set me off. I had curled up on the sofa, sobbing, and she had made me hot chocolate and watched me drink it.

The amazing thing was...they hadn’t pestered me about why. They had asked, of course. They had seemed frustrated when I wouldn’t tell them. They always had.

“I don’t know what you’ve experienced. If I want to love you right, hopefully one day, I’ll find out,” Victoria would say. But they’d never pestered me. They had torn through the wrapping, but hadn’t opened the box.

So when I broke down in front of Beka, the wrapping was already off, and she so calmly, so sweetly, so _delicately_ opened the box. Maybe it happened so easily because I’d been waiting for the right person to do it.

Beka was the first person in the world I opened up to, and the only person I’d ever met who made me actually want to.

 

* * *

 

It had barely been a month and a half. The central heating in the school must have been broken, or the government didn’t care enough about us—the misfit, screwed up little girls who didn’t quite fit into the shoes society made for them—to pay for it in the first place, so as the snow fell in merciless sheets across campus we started to freeze. I had learned to chew my gum discreetly in class, and was fiddling with my pencil under the desk and daydreaming about Victoria’s fingers in Yuuri’s hair beneath the masterful expression of attentiveness that I’d perfected from the scars on the backs of my hands. My grades were passable and I’d fallen into a routine, and at some point I’d come to the realization that I liked Lilia, and I liked Yakov, and they seemed out of place here. I etched my name in tiny Russian letters on the edge of the desk, and a chill ran through my body. I glanced around. The other girls were shivering, too. Some, I could see through the tension in their jaws, must have been in physical pain from suppressing the chattering of their teeth. Even the teacher seemed cold.

Beka and I had decided to meet out in the courtyards after class. We had agreed that today was a skip-group-session-to-get-coffee day. I could already feel myself on the back of her motorcycle, gripping her waist in the way I’d gotten comfortable doing, going to sit in an American diner owned by an Italian woman where we could order a strawberry milkshake (giant) and drink out of it with two straws. We’d get away from here, for just a little bit, and they would yell at us until our ears bled when we returned, but we didn’t care. That escape, that taste of water where there is only sand, was worth it. Beka, with her experience and wisdom and reliability, assured me that it was.

With my trained, newfound knowledge of the courtyards, I went to the designated spot and sat down on a stone bench, wrapped in a scarf and hat and mittens that Victoria and Yuuri had sent me. It was a Halsey kind of day, so as I waited for Beka, I bobbed my head and mouthed the words. I would call Yuuri and Victoria later. Hopefully Yuuri would be sober—it was a crapshoot at this point. I was still trying to decide whether to tell Victoria, but the fear, the coward towering over the ridges of my mind, was screaming at me very loudly not to.

A hand clamped down on my shoulder and I jumped, as the breath left my open lips in a foggy rush of white. I ripped my earbud out and turned around. Expecting to see Beka. It was one of my teachers, a tall, youngish man with not-ugly, sharp features and dark hair. His youth made him even harsher than some of the other teachers, because it meant he had to work that much harder for even a little bit of respect. He was fresh, and he wasn’t used to this power, and he wanted to abuse it but wasn’t quite sure how.

I blinked, trying to absorb the fact that it was him and not Beka, while he glared.

“What are you doing out here, Ms. Plisetsky?” he asked.

“What does it look like?” I finally stammered. I held up an earbud and stood up. 

“Shouldn’t you be inside for group sessions?”

“They don’t start for another thirty—”

“It’s freezing. Go back inside.”

The first step was always feigning care.

“I’m fine. All bundled up,” I shot back.

He was pestering me, for no other reason than to pester me. This was one of those times, I realized. Lilia had told me over and over again to time my rebellions and save my energy, to break the rules only where it mattered and would make a difference. This was one of those times when it mattered. I’m not sure why. There was nothing at stake, except that Beka would wonder where I was and text me, and that would surely turn out fine. There was really nothing for me to lose by going back inside. But that would let him win, would give him power over me, the power that he and all the others were desperately grasping for, plucking at like vultures, and that was worse than anything. Lilia might have disagreed. I could hear her voice in my head telling me that this wasn’t beautiful fire, beautiful rebellion, that I was letting the piece of art that was _me_ get ugly with runny colors. But there was no way I was going to let this government-appointed, power-hungry tyrant take me inside when I was breaking no rules by being outside.

“I told you to go inside.”

“And I told you I’m fine right here,” I said. “I’m meeting a friend. We’ll go back inside when we want to.”

“You’ll go back inside now.”

“Why? I’m not breaking any rules. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m just sitting out here, minding my own business.”

“Because I said so.”

“And suddenly your word is law?”

He narrowed his eyes, in an attempt to be menacing, but I felt nothing.

“My job is to teach you how to respect authority. Don’t question me—just do what I say.”

He was getting angry, because I was fighting back, and my claws were sharper than his. My retort came before I could think through it.

“Make me, asshole.”

When he slapped me, open palm, I tasted blood and bubblegum. My head snapped back, I lost my balance, and suddenly my body was wet from the frost on the ground seeping through my clothes; my head crashed down against the earth. Dizziness, like being on a roller coaster with too many loops, overwhelmed me while hammers came down, hard, onto my scalp. I lifted a hand, like a reflex, to touch the tingling part of my cheek where his hand had made contact. The skin was warm. I sat like that, on the ground, just barely propped up on one elbow and vision blurred, for a full minute. Maybe more. My bubblegum fell from my lips, and I pushed back, I pushed back hard, but the tears still came tumbling from my eyes. His shadow crossed my body and I managed to look up at him, despite the trembling in my limbs and the blood on my teeth.

“You do what I want because I said so. Understand? Pull yourself together and go back inside.”

He left me alone in the courtyard, still sprawled on the ground. I was going to bruise now, I thought, gloved fingertips still hovering above my cheek. I was going to bruise and it was going to look ugly and obvious, but nobody would be able to do anything, even if I did tell. Lilia would complain to Yakov, and Yakov would complain to the government agency appointing the teachers, and the agency would maybe send him a strict warning. In the end, they would just say that we were delinquents, and sometimes teachers needed to use whatever means necessary to make us understand what it meant to be a functional, productive member of society. When I closed my eyes to rid myself of the spinning fog around me, I saw his hand coming down on me, over and over and over again, and I relived the slam of his palm and the snap of my head.

I tried to stand up, but my gloves were wet and my body was weak—physically and mentally and emotionally drained. I was in pain. It hurt. It hurt really fucking badly. So in the end I gave in to the weakness the palm of his hand had slammed into me, and I curled up on the earth. It was cold on my cheek. Like when you turn over your pillow in bed. I opened my eyes because I preferred the spins to the image of him slapping me. Over and over and over again. No remorse, no understanding in his eyes. He’d done what he thought he had to—he’d done what he needed to do to convince himself that he was powerful and respected. I’d been here before.

Beka found me still curled up on the ground. Eyes open, cheek on the ground, body trembling. My gloves were covered in mud. They were expensive. Victoria had gotten them for me for Christmas. Our first and, so far, only Christmas together. She complained about Christmas because it distracted from her birthday on the same day. That’s why Yuuri treated her like a queen even more on Christmas. They were really, really expensive gloves, but I didn’t have any others and she’d noticed and bought them for me.

She got down on her knees (she was wearing leggings instead of socks) and helped me sit up. Then she wiped the tears from my eyes and my cheeks, got me to feet, spoke to me in Russian because I’d let it slip once that Russian made me feel like home.

**“[Всё будет хорошо.](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%91%20%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%82%20%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%BE.)”**

**“Всё будет хорошо.”**

**“Всё будет хорошо.”**

She got down on her knees while I sat on the bench with my hands in my lap, focusing hard on the words coming from her lips. Trying my best to believe them. She took my gloves off, held my hands, and calmly, slowly, asked me what happened. I took a deep breath.

“Come up here and sit next to me,” I said. When she sat down I saw the mud stains on her knees and they made me want to cry. As I lay my head, suddenly too heavy for my neck, on her shoulder, she put an arm around me. Her thumb moved back and forth in rhythmic, musical, silken lines on my shoulder and her breath fell like feathers at the very top of my forehead.

I sobbed and exhausted myself and she didn’t say anything. Just held me and let me cry. She noticed my cheek was red, so she leaned over and kissed it—there must have been something about being locked up here, all of us, that brought us closer faster than teens in other places. I exhausted myself, cried out every angry, sad, frightened tear, and once I was totally tried out, she stood up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up.

“Nothing a milkshake can’t solve,” she said with a smile. Quiet, dirty, sad and scared, we tiptoed to her motorcycle and got the fuck off campus. I held onto her waist as tightly as I could and pressed my cheek, the one still free of blemishes, to her back. She still forced me to wear her only helmet.

“You’re so much prettier than me—I’d rather my face get busted up than yours.”

Michelina must have noticed the somber air that surrounded us, because she brought us a strawberry milkshake with an extra maraschino cherry, two straws, and left us alone. Beka and I were quiet for a bit. Sipping on the milkshake, comfortable in the silence the way that friends are comfortable in silence.

“So...what happened?” she finally asked.

I told her what happened. She listened without taking a sip until I was done. As I spoke, my fear subsided, replaced with white, numbing rage. But the sadness—the sadness was still there, and for now, it was smothering all that rage. Because the sound, the pain of that slap, had brought up everything that I always worked so hard to keep down, all the things that would inevitably make me sad. That wall, that anger I used as a shield, was totally shattered.

When I finished explaining, she sighed.

“A few weeks after I first got here,” she began, “I ignored one of the teachers when he tried to talk to me. Just wouldn’t acknowledge him. Not a big deal—at least, I didn’t think so. He smashed my head onto the desk and wouldn’t let me go to the nurse’s office when I got dizzy.”

“It’s not fair. I see it all the time in class.”

“They like to rough us up. Makes them feel bigger than us.”

“It’s not fucking fair.”

“I know.”

I stared at the table and listened to her swallow. Her hair was growing out. She’d need to shave it again soon.

“Not a lot of people hit me,” I said.

It was a hint. A hint that I wanted to talk to her about this, talk to her about the things I’d never talked about with anybody, because she’d literally picked me up off the ground, dusted me off, kissed my cheek and held my hand. I wanted her to know every detail about me, and I wanted to know every detail about her, and I wanted us to obsess over being there for each other. It was hard for me to grasp or understand that feeling, because it wasn’t anything I’d experienced before, but when I looked into Otabek’s eyes, glistening with genuine care and attentiveness and sharp, keen kindness, everything I’d ever suppressed became eager to rush out in stampedes of honesty and cathartic resentment.  

“But some people did,” she replied.

“Some people did.” 


	17. 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: rape and child abuse 
> 
> xoxo

**17**

After the car accident, I shut down and decided that unrestrained rage was the best way to keep people out of my life. I was small and powerless, and very sad, and lashing out at people made me feel a little less small and a little less powerless. Watching them cringe, hearing my own voice booming, echoing off walls around us and bouncing around, gave me fake power. But fake was enough for me, so anger became my main means of communication. Some people handled it, some people didn’t, some people tried and failed (all except Victoria and Yuuri, obviously, but I fucked that one up myself).

In one house, a mother and father decided to treat me as their experiment child. Sure, they said, we’ll adopt a troubled, emotional Russian girl living in rags who speaks in tongues of anger and see if we can fix her with lace doilies, doll houses, private tutors, hired help and fancy gardens and soccer mom vans. We’ll throw money and fake affection and she’ll turn out nice and polite like our other children. The father was fine enough. He provided the money and left me alone for the most part. He had a den where he spent all his time, with very, very fancy wine, solid gold pens, and fine print. He’d sit at the dinner table and would sometimes ask me how my day was going and tell me that my skirt was too short.

But the mother was a control freak, the kind who needed every little hair to be in place, and I was like a DIY project—akin to the ones she watched on HGTV in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices where she would get chemicals injected into her wrinkles. She learned quickly that I had a sharp tongue that I stabbed indiscriminately with, and her plastic smile twitched each time I yelled at her. It was only a week before she started hitting me. Not too hard, but enough that I started to get bruises. I couldn’t be as obedient and quiet as her actual children, the ones with the topknots and honors diplomas. It frustrated her, because I was the first thing in her life she didn’t have control over, and she didn’t know what to do except hit me.

At another house, the parents were fine enough, but their oldest son got picked on at school and used my belligerent nature as an excuse to take it out on me. He tugged my hair until my scalp burned, grasped my wrists until they were ringed with red handcuffs, and one time he punched me in the gut so hard that I was retching. He liked the look of it, so he kept doing it. I’d never hated anyone as much as I hated him, but my fists were too weak to do anything against his bench-pressing muscles.

There’d been a few others. A slap here, a kick there, tugging on hair. One man—a second husband to a woman too nervous to properly take of herself, let alone children—snuck into my room one night and tried to touch me. I screamed so loudly that the neighbors called the police, but every so often I think about the girls that had come before me.

By the time I finished pouring everything out to Beka, we’d gone through three milkshakes and there was probably a search party out for us. But when I’d cut myself off, insisted we go back so we wouldn’t get in trouble, she’d refused with a curt, decisive shake of her head.

“No. You’re still talking, and I’m still listening. Keep going, babe.”

When we were the only ones left in the diner, Michelina told us that the milkshakes were on the house with a beautiful, warm smile, and I could tell she didn’t hand them out often. Beka and I walked out, arms intertwined, and I was leaning on her. My head was spinning and my body was weak from all the tears I’d spilled. We got onto the bike, and I pressed my cheek, the one still tingling, against her leather jacket.

I called Phichit, and he let us in the back door so that nobody would catch us. They’d punish us tomorrow. Lilia would give me a lecture. Victoria would call, absolutely furious, to complain that Yakov had told her I skipped therapy again. But we wanted to be sad and strong together right now, away from the ones who hurt us and tried to stomp on us. I grabbed a pair of pajamas, and Phichit promised he’d cover for me in case someone decided to check in to make sure I was in bed. Then I went to Beka’s room for the night. It was the night we began our tradition of watching and laughing at very bad movies. It was Friday and we had the smallest, sweetest bit of freedom.

“Let’s watch a funny movie,” she suggested.

We were on the bed, in our pajamas, and she was playing with my hair. We were sucking on lollipops that she had stashed—we liked to make jokes that we were like prisoners, smuggling in bubblegum and lollipops and trading them for braids and cell phone hacks.

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Come on. We’ll watch one of those really shitty ones. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Fine. Whatever. Don’t blame me if I fall asleep.”

“You can fall asleep,” she laughed.

We watched _The Room._ I didn’t fall asleep. We laughed for hours, said obscene things in Russian, shat on the teachers and some of the students who bought into this establishment. The rich ones who’d gotten caught shoplifting or fucking or something.

When I was starting to fall asleep, but still awake enough to hear her words with crystal clarity, Beka started talking. A lot. And about things that woke me right up again. We were cuddling and warm with each other and still chuckling about the movie.

“Remember when we were first getting close,” she began, “and you asked me why I was even here?”

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t tell you.”

“I don’t need you to. It’s really none of my business.”

“You told me your story.”

“Because I wanted to. You don’t owe me anything,” I snapped.

She was quiet for a second. Then she took a deep breath.

“I used to carry a knife around Astana. Same as New York, Chicago, even Boston—a young girl in a city can get into trouble really easily.”

“Makes sense.”

“I got so used to having it, and so comfortable with it, that I started sneaking it into school.”

I considered saying something snarky. Like...what a badass. Or...how rebellious of you. But there was something in her tone. I shut my mouth. Only for her, I shut my mouth.

“I really liked history. I liked a lot of subjects, I liked learning, but I especially liked history. I was good at it. The teacher said so. He was a middle-aged guy who used a lot of big words.”

“Beka, you don’t have to—”

“I want to. Really.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“He told me I was special. I kind of was. Not really a rebel, but with the façade of one.”

“The leather jacket and all.”

“Right. I smoked cigarettes with boys outside of the school, smoked some other things. I didn’t respond when people talked to me, acted like I didn’t study or do work when really I did.”

“Mm.”

“But this teacher saw past all that. [Сіз, Beka арнайы боласыз](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%A1%D1%96%D0%B7%2C%20Beka%20%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%8B%20%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%8B%D0%B7). He used to give me books to read outside of class.”

Her voice was going into autopilot, but I didn’t stop listening for a single second.

“I talked more in his class than I did anywhere else. One day he asked me to stop by his room after school—wanted to talk to me about future prospects. That’s what he said, anyway.”

I was getting nervous, but I wanted to listen to her. I wanted to be this person for her.

“So I went. I was very stupid, and I went.”

“Beka...”

“He put his hand between my legs. I pushed him away and told him to stop. That’s when he got assertive and grabbed my arm. Pulled me. My hair was long then. He pulled on that, too.”

I held my breath and held her tighter. Her hand was clammy, but her voice was smooth. She was speaking with absolute, total, practiced composure.

“My skirt was down. He had me pinned to the desk and was ripping at my underwear. It was the only thing I could do, you know?”

“Of course. Of course it was.”

“He nearly died. They made me feel guilty about it.”

I hugged her as tightly as I could, resting my head in the crook of her neck. She had started squeezing my hand, maybe without realizing.

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You know that, right?” I said.

“Yeah. But nobody wants me to believe it. Especially here.”

“I do.”

She turned onto her side and hugged me, and I couldn’t breathe. I loved that breathlessness. She needed this. I could tell.

“I haven’t told anybody,” she murmured.

“I’m glad you told me,” I murmured back. I wasn’t sure if she fell asleep at all that night, if the nightmares were resurfacing, if having me there was more of a nuisance than anything else, but I slept soundly. Dreamlessly. I was so deep in sleep that when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was, what I was doing—I hardly knew who I was. All I knew was that Beka’s face was in front of me, and I recognized her instantly.

 

* * *

 

The foundation wasn’t working. I’d been in this bathroom for fifteen minutes, caking on foundation—Victoria had helped me pick—to cover the smudged black and blue and yellowing spots on my left cheek. But I couldn’t get it right. I wasn’t used to doing this much makeup. I hardly did anything but lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner. I had no idea what I was doing, my fingers trembled while I wiped it off and tried again, but still the bruises shined out grotesquely from under the pale powder. I threw down the brush, frustrated and angry, and watched it bounce in the dirty ceramic sink. I leaned in close, mesmerized and infuriated by the mark his disgusting, mangled hand had left. There were tears in the crinkles of my eyes, and I almost hated that more.

“Good morning, Tsarina Bubblegum.”

I flinched and whirled around, forgetting just how obvious the distortion in my skin was. And here I was, ugly from the debris of a tyrant’s rampage, facing beautiful, perfect, glossy-lipped and silky-haired JJ. Her hair fell into a braid messy from sleep over her shoulder, her face was swollen from having just woken up, she was wearing those baggy sweatpants and that oversized t-shirt, but she was still beautiful. She stopped when she saw me, blinked those big blue doe eyes, and then looked past me at the scattered makeup. She opened her mouth, but I cut her off.

“Don’t fucking say anything,” I hissed. Her lips closed, but she kept staring at me. She looked like she was thinking—or maybe she was putting on the façade that she was thinking. I didn’t know what type of person she was; otherwise I would have been able to tell much more easily.

She did what I told her: didn’t say anything. But before I could protest or muster enough strength to properly pull away, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the bathroom. I tugged, tried to pull my hand from her grip, but it was like a python. She pulled me down the hall, opened the door to her room, and pulled me in.

“What the hell?” I cried as she closed the door.

“Don’t worry. Relax a bit, would you? Sit down over there.”

She pointed to the chair at her desk. Her room was totally average. Not too messy, not too organized, with generic motivational posters and a Rihanna one—maybe autographed. There was music playing, nothing I could recognize, and some clothes on the bed. I felt absurdly uncomfortable but, for some reason, couldn’t bring myself to turn and leave. I easily could have. Something in her voice when she told me to relax (while it didn’t make me relax at all) made me want to stay.

“Why?” I shot back.

“You obviously don’t know how to do it yourself.”

She grabbed her makeup bag from the desk and pointed again at the chair. Her smile was strangely bright.

“Come on. Sit down. I’m good at this, I promise.”

I sat down, hands tight in my lap.

“Turn and look at that wall.”

I pouted up at her, but she just kept smiling. Almost reminded me a bit of Victoria.

“Go ahead. Turn. Close your eyes if you want.”

“Whatever.”

I looked at the wall, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her dipping her brush into a swirl of foundation. I didn’t close my eyes. The next moment, the soft tips of her brush were swiping across my cheek, in practiced, graceful movements. They weren’t rhythmic; fast, then slow, then fast. Broad, short, precise, long. She was humming along with the music. It was in French. I saw the flicker of her black braid against her chest, saw her lips open just slightly, as she painted me.

“Your skin is gorgeous,” she said softly, “and trust me, I know good skin.”

“Right.”

“How’d this happen, anyway?”

“None of your business.”

“Aw, come on. Whatever it is, we’ve all seen it, anyway.”

She tucked my hair behind my ear, so she could get the foundation up there, too. Her fingertips were velvet on my coarse cheek.

“My skin bruises so easily. I’d have a hell of a time covering something like this up,” she continued. Liking to hear herself talk.

“Good thing I have someone like you around to help me,” I said sarcastically.

“You’re pretty. It makes sense that you don’t know how to do makeup.”

“I mean...you’re plenty pretty without makeup.”

“I know. Still, that’s sweet of you to say.”

She smiled, her eyelashes fluttered, her black oil hair rippled, and I hated myself for saying something so nice. So many people before me had said things like that to her. Was that really such a bad thing?

“ _Voilá._ You look as cute as ever.”

I turned to face her, and though I couldn’t see my reflection quite yet, I felt smoothened. Covered up, like my skin was sparkling with fake perfection, performative beauty, the glue you put on cracked vases and the coat of paint you put to cover it. She took a step back to admire her work.

“Now you can hide from as many people as you want.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I snapped. She blinked.

“Maybe not. But I do know that no matter how fucked up you think you are, there’s always somebody a little bit more fucked up. Especially here.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“Oh, speaking of, here’s some advice: don’t go to the nurses.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“And try not to rock the boat.”

“Why, you ever tried?”

“Me? No. Like you said—my face is too pretty. Wouldn’t want to get it messed up.”

As she moved back toward the door, one hand on the handle, she paused. Looked back over at me. Smiled. Not really a sweet smile. A smile dripping with cynicism, narcissism, pity, understanding. Resentment. That definitely wasn’t the smile she used to seduce people, not the smile she used when she was breaking people’s hearts. It was the smile she used to avoid getting her own heart broken.

“You’re too cute to get hit. Just do what they say and look down while you do it.”

“I’d rather be in jail than do that.”

“Suit yourself. If you need to be covered up again, give me a shout. _Á plus._ ”

One day, I told myself, no matter how broken I was inside, I would be able to walk with that much confidence. So that people’s first thought wouldn’t be “She’s broken.” Their first thought would be “Wow.” That’s how JJ was. Despite how broken she must have been inside.  


	18. 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scroll over the Russian for the translation :) 
> 
> sorry for the wait! just a few chapters left <3 
> 
> xoxo

**18**

        “Yurotchka, we haven’t heard from you in a week. Is everything okay?”

        “Yeah, everything’s fine. Busy with homework. Or, whatever.”

        “You, busy with homework? I didn’t realize you were such a comedian!”

        “Fucking bite me.”

        It had been two weeks since the tyrant had laid his hand on me. The bruise was faded, and Beka and I were more glued to the hip than ever. We’d gotten chewed out and punished for disappearing on the day it happened, but things had settled. Victoria and Yuuri had given me their piece.

        “It seems you’ve finally started staying out of trouble. We haven’t heard from Yakov, either.”

        “Or maybe I’ve gotten really good at covering it up.”

        “Don’t even joke about that,” she retorted, but with laughter in her voice.

        “So...how are you guys?”

        “We’re wonderful. Thank you for asking.”

        “Is pork cutlet doing okay?”

        “Yuuri’s fine.”

        I knew there was hesitation in her voice. And I knew why. Yuuri was usually texting me, calling me, desperate to talk to me and throw me her little pearls of wisdom, but for the past few days I hadn’t even received a single message from her.

        “Are you sure?” I said.

        A pause.

        “Yes.”

        “Where is she? I want to talk to her.”

        “Asleep.”

        “It’s two in the afternoon.”

        “She had a long night.”

        “Oh.”

        “Yurotchka, [котенок](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA), do you need anything from us? We want to come visit you soon.”

        “No.”

        “If you change your mind, we’re a phone call away.”

        “Okay.”

        “We love you. Very much. Our sweet girl.”

        “Stop, I’m gonna puke.”

        She made a kissing noise into the phone. I almost felt her lips on my forehead, almost felt her fingers in my hair. I smiled, relieved that she couldn’t see it.

        “[ **Спокойной ночи и сладких снов, милая девушка**](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9%20%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B8%20%D0%B8%20%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85%20%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%2C%20%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%8F%20%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B0.)[.](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9%20%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B8%20%D0%B8%20%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85%20%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%2C%20%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%8F%20%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B0.)”

        “[Пока](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B0) **.** ”  

       

* * *

 

        The snow was falling fast, hard, veiling the universe in a white haze. Beka and I walked along the school corridors, bubblegum in our mouths, watching the courtyards swirl around in the harsh New England winter winds. There was almost nobody else around. It was that time of year when finals roll around, it’s cold and frightening outside, and people find solace and makeshift warmth in their rooms, their holes. But Beka and I found that solace with each other, roaming these halls, chewing fruity pink bubblegum and telling secrets. She had her bag swinging over her shoulder and I was walking on the shaved side of her head.

        “You need to shave again,” I said, eyes on the window. Her reflection looked over at me, bubble exploding from her lips.

        “And you need a haircut.” She grabbed the end of my braid, now almost down to the center of my back.

        “Maybe I’m trying to grow it out.”

        “Then you have my full support, [царица](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D1%86%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0).”

        “[Весьма признателен](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%92%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BC%D0%B0%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD).”

        I blew a bubble in her face, and she popped it with a pen she was spinning in her fingers.

        I saw something move from the corner of my eye, and I froze, digging my fingers into Beka’s arm.

        “Ow, Yuri, what the—?”

        “Shh!”

        We fell silent, and I looked at the other end of the hallway.

        It had been weeks, maybe more, since I’d seen the cat. I always kept my ears straining to hear her little meows, my eyes open to catch a glimpse of her sweet white fur rippling with the thunderous steps of her fluffy little paws. She was sneaking about, silent, lovely, like some sort of otherworldly creature that had been thrown into this horrible place to bring some speck of beauty.

        “Stay here and shut up,” I whispered, squeezed Beka’s arm, then dropped my bag against the wall and took off my loafers.

        “Yu—”

        “SHH!”

        I tiptoed down toward the cat, trying to keep her from noticing until the very last moment. I crouched, low to the ground, and blurred the world around me so I could focus on that precious little baby. I’d always had a soft spot, an undeniable passion, for cats—it had haunted me that my first day here, this cat had been there. Like she was accompanying me, joining me on this journey through flames and tyrants licking at my heels. I wanted to pet her, hold her, thank her. She stopped and sat down, and began licking her paw, using it to rub her face, while her tail flicked back and forth. I matched my footsteps to the tone of those flickers. When I was close enough, she must have heard my light step like an earthquake, because she froze for a moment, like a painting, the way that cats do. She lifted her face up and met my eyes—her little cookie brown face. I froze, too.

        Then I stretched my arm out, slowly, lengthened it the way Victoria did when she was on the couch and wanted Yuuri to dance over and give her a kiss. I puckered my lips, crouched so low that the ends of my too-long-scarecrow-braid brushed the ground. I saw myself in her eyes, saw some inner place of chaos and turmoil tucked into a pretty little face and winged eyes. I wiggled my fingers.

        “Hi, sweetie,” I whispered. She didn’t take her eyes away from me, but her tail flickered. I’d never actually had a cat before, but I’d played with Russian street cats and chased their tails and protected them from bullies.

        “I’m not gonna hurt you,” I continued. I made kissing sounds and wiggled my fingers again. Curiosity must have gotten the best of her. She stood, languid, graceful, and cautiously came forward. Her nose quivered as she sniffed the tips of my painted-pink fingers, the moment of truth, in which she would make the decision to either trust me or walk away. Leaving me with a broken heart, unworthy even of the trust of this kitty. In that moment, I heard myself start to sing, quietly, in Russian.

_Pussy, little kitty, kitty—little, grey tail._

_Come to us and stay the night, to rock our little baby._

_I will pay you, little cat, for your job._

_I will give you a piece of cake and a jug of milk._

She opened her mouth and let out a quiet whimper, and brushed her head on the side of my hand. I started to pet her head, press her ears down, and she mashed her face into the palm of my hand. A smile spreading onto my lips, I fell to my knees and pet her with both hands, until she took another step forward and rubbed against my legs and neck.

        “[Милый ребенок](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%B9%20%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA),” I purred with her. I picked her up and she fell sweetly into my arms. I got to my feet, and made my way back to Beka, leaning against the corridor window, smiling.

        “You finally found the love of your life, huh?” she grinned.

        “Look at how sweet she is! Go on, pet her.”

        Beka reached her hand out, wearing one of her stupid fingerless gloves that I liked to tease her about, and scratched the top of the kitty’s head. The cat took an immediate liking to her—in a similar manner as me. Beka had a way of working with kittens, I guess.

        “What’s her name?” Beka asked.

        “[Пётя](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%9F%D1%91%D1%82%D1%8F),” I replied.

        “Potya? That’s a guy’s name.”

        “You’re one to talk.”

        “Guess it fits. All right, so what do we do with her? Pets aren’t allowed.”

        “And since when do we follow the rules, Beka-chan?”

        “I beg your pardon, what?”

        “Come on. I’ll just call Phichit and ask if he’s okay with keeping her in the room. You can get cat food, right?”

        “Sure, but what about, like, pooping?”

        “We’ll get a cardboard box and some litter and it’ll be fine.”

        “All right, Miss Cat Whisperer. Whatever you want.”

        I buried my face in Potya’s fur and gave her a sweet little kiss.

        “She already seems attached to you,” Beka mused.

        “She can just feel how much I love her.”

        “You? Love?” Beka scratched the top of Potya’s head. “Never heard you actually use that word before. Not even with Yuuri and Victoria.”

        “Because they’re people.”

        Otabek pouted, but I just gave her my cheekiest smile.

        “Carry my bag back to the room, would you? My hands are full.”

        We started to walk back—Beka carried my bag and my shoes, and kept watch for anyone who’d want to take Potya away. I stayed close to the window, my socked feet padding on the grimy tile floors. Potya wasn’t a fidgety cat. She was adventurous, kind of wild, but she liked to be held and cuddled and never once tried to move out of my arms. She burrowed against my chest and her purrs pulsed through me.

        “Hey, Beka,” I said, stopping in my tracks. Out there, in this pseudo-blizzard, I could’ve sworn I saw two people. Wearing thick jackets, walking in circles around the courtyard, leaving footsteps in the snow that were covered up almost as soon as they were made.

        “Am I just hallucinating, or...?”

        “Nope, I see them, too,” she said, stopping beside me.

        “I can’t...quite tell...”

        “It’s Phichit. Phichit and Seung-ah.”

        We’d gotten into a habit of having dinner with them, and Lea and Guanghong. Beka was friendly with them, maybe a bit more than me, and we’d become like fixtures at their table.

        “What the hell are they doing outside? They’re gonna freeze.”

        “Are you really one to question them?” Beka teased.

        “Shut up. Maybe we should go out and tell them to come in. Before they get hypothermia or something.”

        “No. Leave them be.”

 

* * *

        I’d walked in on them in the room once, after I’d finally gotten the image of them in the courtyard out of my head. Should’ve put a sock on the door or something. They hadn’t done anything really nasty yet, though they certainly did after I left. I stumbled in, exhausted from a session with Lilia and ready for a session with _babushka_ and my webcam, but they were in Phichit’s bed. He was still fully dressed, on top of her, and she was wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Her hair, usually in its neat ponytail, was spread out on the pillow in gorgeous black feathers. Her fingers were clutching the bed sheets, her legs pale and bent and toes curled, her back arched slightly off the bed. Phichit’s lips were pressed to her chest, in between her breasts, while his hands were sliding under her back to undo her bra. Seung-ah’s mouth was wide open, and a thick strand of her hair was stuck in her red lip-gloss.

        They stopped when they heard the door open, pulled apart, and Seung-ah clawed for the blankets to cover herself up. It was the first time I’d seen any type of emotion in her face.

        “I...ah...s-sorry,” I stammered, and then closed the door. Before I could leave, shaken, the door opened and Phichit was there, eyes wide, sweating bullets.

        “Yuri, wait, please—”

        “I’m not gonna tell anybody,” I said, eager to get away, “don’t worry.”

        “Okay. Thanks.” He smiled gratefully. “You know how the supervisors get.”

        One of our very strict rules was no sexual contact.  

        “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

        I scurried back to Lilia’s office and asked her if I could stay and do my homework there. She said of course.

 

* * *

 

        “Seung-ah always seemed so fragile. She’s gonna freeze to death out there,” I observed, but Beka kept walking so I followed.

        “Phichit’s taking care of her.”

        “Yeah. He does that.”

        We walked on in silence for a few moments.

        “Are you close to Seung-ah?” Beka asked.

        “What? No. You see her at dinner. She hardly says anything except about the books she’s reading. Always goes over my head.”

        “Right.”

        “Why?”

        “Doesn’t seem like she’s really close to anybody. Except Phichit. He ever talk about her?”

        “No. What is with your interest in Seung-ah?”

        “It’s just...”

        “I won’t tell anyone. What’s up?”

        She pulled me into a corner, made sure nobody was around, then looked me in the eyes.

        “I heard that part of the reason she’s here is because she tried to commit suicide. Back home,” Beka said.

        “W-wait, wha—?”

        “I just wanted to see if you knew anything. So that she doesn’t, you know, hurt herself or anything.”

        “I mean, Phichit would be the person to talk to about that,” I stumbled. Beka seemed focused, intent, protective. It was a look I recognized. “I’m sure she’s fine, Beka.”

        “Yeah.”

        She took a deep breath, and we kept walking. Suddenly I had the image of Seung-ah, struggling to cover up her body with those blankets after I’d walked in on them, beautiful and innocent and red-cheeked.

        We really were pretty fucked up. All of us. And JJ was probably right. Lots of people in the world were much more broken than me.

 

* * *

 

        With Phichit and Otabek’s help, I got everything I needed to take care of Potya. She was a sweet, good girl, who didn’t meow unless she wanted cuddles, never whined, climbed onto the bed while I was sleeping and trembling with nightmares. She could tell when I needed her—a special sense that drove her to my side when there were tears on my cheeks and tremors in my fingers. When I was sitting on the bed, speaking into my webcam with _babushka_ , she would curl up in my lap, and sometimes she would leave little scratches on my thighs from her happy claws. She could be annoying sometimes. She’d hop onto the bed in the middle of the night, rub her face on mine, purr until I was wide-awake. I’d never felt so comfortable, knowing that Potya was waiting for me in my room after my day of minuscule revolutions and tiny wars. She was always curled up on my pillow, and as soon as the door opened she would jump down to greet me. Phichit, too. She liked him well enough, but not nearly as much as she liked Beka or me.

        We knew she would get anxious, staying cooped up in that room, so we would sneak her out to one of the back-alley courtyards where the supervisors and tyrants never went. We would let her run around, playing with the plants and the ivy climbing along the bricks, leaving adorable paw prints in thin or thick blankets of snow. Then when she got tired and sleepy, we would carry her back in and she would be happy. I loved her, I loved her a lot, and she made me wonder why I’d never asked Yuuri and Victoria to get me a cat. Yuuri would have done it no questions asked. She always did like to spoil me.


	19. 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: self-harm and abuse
> 
>  
> 
> only a few chapters left!! 
> 
> xoxo

**19**

I thought I was pretty much in the clear. If I could just be quiet, cover up the bruise, not rock any more boats, rebel in tiny ways that didn’t hurt or irritate anybody too much, I could be in the clear. If I could hold my tongue and follow Lilia’s advice—only break the rules when it’s worth it, when it’s productive, when it changes something for the better—if I could just do that, I would be in the clear. If I could just hang around with Beka, keep my cat a secret, braid my hair, have dinner in groups and do my homework and call my parents like a good girl, I could be in the clear. If I could stay away from that man, stay out of the courtyard he assaulted me in, ask JJ to help me with makeup, I would be in the fucking clear.

But I was a target. I’d always been a target. Because of how small I was. How feisty I was. How angry, how so fucking angry, I always was. How red my lipstick was, winged my eyeliner was, and because I hadn’t said anything after the first time. I should’ve known I was never in the clear, I was always a target.

 

* * *

 

“How are your parents?”

“I haven’t actually talked to Yuuri in a while.”

“Victoria?”

“She says she’s fine. But I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“Because usually they put me on speaker phone, or FaceTime me together, but lately when I call it’s just Victoria.”

Lilia was teaching me a new braid. Asking me about my day, my family, if I needed help with my homework or counseling or something. I’d grown comfortable in her presence, because she made me feel like a beautiful work of art that I myself was creating.

“Is Yuuri okay?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Was she okay when you left home?”

“What, four months ago? I mean, generally she was fine, but...”

“But?”

I cringed when she pulled back, hard, on my scalp.

“She would sneak wine into her water bottles and wouldn’t tell Victoria.”

“Why didn’t you tell Victoria?”

“I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

I missed Yuuri. I missed her music recommendations, her sweet, comforting words, the way she helped me with my math homework and danced with me. I’d heard Victoria’s voice a lot in the past few weeks, but not Yuuri, not even once.

“I think they’re coming to visit me soon. You should meet them.”

“I would like that. I’ll tell them how proud of you they should be.”

She smiled, so I smiled back, but I was still thinking about Yuuri.

 

* * *

 

We love you. We love you so much. You are our daughter, our sweet, beautiful, intelligent daughter and you deserve everything. If you have any problems, any problems ever, please come talk to us. We will help you. We will do everything we can to protect you. That’s all we want to do, you know. Protect you. You don’t have to be our biological daughter to be our real daughter. We don’t have to have known you very long to love you more than we can even say. Both of us love you very much, Yuri. Yurotchka. Yuri-chan. Beautiful **котенок**. You don’t have to say that you love us back, but at least let us protect you. We know you’re strong—oh, you’re so strong, love—but we know you can’t handle everything. Nobody can. We’ll help you, our strong little girl, we’ll protect you. You know that, don’t you? We’ll love and protect you no matter what.

 

* * *

 

It was February. They hadn’t let us go home for Christmas, but we had known that. I’d been there since October. Victoria and Yuuri were coming to visit at the end of the month, so they could be here for my sixteenth birthday—only the second birthday of mine we’d celebrate together. Visitation was strict, but Victoria promised that she had a present and had already made reservations at a fancy restaurant in Boston. I’d never seen Boston. I was excited. She assured me that Yuuri had a present, too. A beautiful one, a special one, and I was desperate all of a sudden to feel Yuuri’s embrace. I admitted first to myself, then to _babushka_ and my webcam, then to Beka, that I missed them both a lot, because there was nothing I was afraid of in their home other than myself. Myself hurting people, I was so very afraid of hurting them. They didn’t deserve it. They only deserved the best side of me.

The snow was still falling, and I was at a point in my life where Beka was my anchor and practically my everything. She had introduced to me a new type of friendship that was deep, compassionate, open. I hadn’t ever opened up to anybody the way I opened up to Beka, and she told me she felt the same about me. We stayed up for hours talking, roamed the halls of the school and the courtyards until we got lost, gave each other bubblegum, painted each other’s nails, cuddled until we fell asleep and did each other’s hair. With each day that passed we became more glued at the hip. I already had my nickname, Tsarina Bubblegum, and everybody started calling Beka Bogatyr Bubblegum—Bubblegum Bodyguard. Because she protected me, always had her arm around my shoulder.

I asked her once to sing me one of the lullabies Victoria used to sing to me. On a day when I was feeling disgusting for some reason, when I wanted to hear Russian and feel someone’s love, even if it was fake. But I knew with Beka, it wasn’t fake. She would do what I asked her to do, play the music I wanted, run her hands through my hair. I taught her the lullaby, then I put my head in her lap.

_Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti,_

_         The cat took a taxi. _

_         She paid a hundred rubles and went to the museum, _

_         And the kitten clung on and rode for free. _

“Okay, now play me some EDM,” I said.

“You got it, babe.”

She pulled out her laptop and blasted the music, and nobody in the hall asked us to lower the volume because they liked it, too.

 

* * *

 

It happened after class. I should’ve seen it coming, I really should’ve.

I was feeling particularly rebellious that day, but I knew the limits now. Even I didn’t think I had crossed them. Some tyrants had thicker lines than others.

I was doodling in my notebook during his class. Writing a letter to Yuuri, that maybe one day I’d give her.

_Hey, pork cutlet. How’s it going? Haven’t heard from you in a while. I’m sitting in class, trying not to look this guy in the eye because he slapped me once, and I’m thinking about you. I’ve never really told you to your face, but you’re really pretty, you know? I wish you’d stop with the vitamin water. I miss you. But maybe I shouldn’t be complaining. It’s probably my fault. You were fine before I showed up. I guess I should be apologizing. Sorry for making you drink._

“Ms. Plisetsky!”

His voice was so harsh that when I snapped to, looked up, it must have been at least the third time he was calling my name.

“Uh, yeah, what’s up?”

“You did do your homework, didn’t you?”

“Sure I did. Right here.” I held up my assignment and waved it like a victory banner.

“Then you should be able to easily answer the question I asked.”

“Um.” I stared at him for a moment, felt the whole room’s collective eye on me, and I knew that if I shrank back now, I would have failed everyone there counting on their tsarina. “Maybe if you repeat the question in more clarity.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Repeat the question, please.”

It was a challenge. A hidden, subtle challenge, in kind words and a pretty smile, but it was a challenge nonetheless. I shouldn’t have said anything. But everybody’s eyes were on me, and I figured that I had been so good, it couldn’t possibly have been such a bad idea.

“Stay and talk to me after class, Ms. Plisetsky,” he said, without repeating the question.

 

* * *

 

We’ll protect you, Yuri. Please don’t hide from us the things that hurt you, because we want to help you get rid of them. Talk to us please. All we want is for you to be safe, comfortable, for you to feel loved. We want you to know that we love you. We’ll fight for you, Yuri, Yurotchka, we’ll fight so hard for you. With fists and swords and guns and everything we have, we’ll fight for you.

 

* * *

 

“How dare you talk back to me in class?” he shot at me once we were alone in the classroom. Door closed. Maybe I should’ve carried a knife around with me, the way Beka used to. But I didn’t think he was going to try and touch me. He wasn’t after that kind of power.

“I wasn’t talking back, sir. I just didn’t hear the question.”

“Because you weren’t paying attention?”

“I...haven’t been getting a lot of sleep,” I replied, uncertainty shaking my voice.

“What kind of excuse is that? You’re a high school delinquent. What do you even have to lose sleep over?”

I didn’t respond. He didn’t deserve to hear me explain anything to him. Didn’t deserve my excuses, my justifications, didn’t deserve to get even a glimpse of the chaos and terror ravaging me from the inside out.

“Nothing to say? No other excuses? Your dog ate your homework, maybe?”

“I won’t talk back again. Can I leave?”

I don’t know why that was the trigger for him. Why that little question sent him over the edge, pushed him into the gorge he’d been staring into. He slapped me, almost the same way he’d done the first time, but he slapped me a second time on the other cheek with the back of his hand. It was so hard, painful, made me so dizzy, that I cried out and stumbled back against the door. Before my knees could even buckle, he stepped forward, pressed his hand to my throat and pushed back until the back of my head crashed against the wooden door. I was seeing stars, feeling weak, spinning into a void of resentment and sadness and the passionate desire to spit in his face.

“How dare you mock me?” he hissed. I was too weak to even respond, but not too weak to stare into his eyes. Hold his gaze, despite the spots of blackness and flashes of color that made my entire body shake.

“The next time you talk back to me, there won’t just be bruises.”

I thought I was going to black out. I couldn’t breathe. When finally he let go, I crumpled to the ground, gasped for air, put my hand to my throat and struggled to take in as much air as I could.

“Get out of my sight.”

I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could and left, without even the energy or the will to call Beka and ask her to come over. Straight to the bathroom, straight to the bathroom, I told myself, straight to the fucking bathroom to wipe the print of his hand off my cheeks. I couldn’t walk straight, and the girls around me noticed. A few them offered to help me—almost everybody recognized me because I’d rescued all their phones. But I shook them away, desperate to just get to the damn bathroom.

I didn’t even take off my clothes. I dumped my backpack at the entrance of the bathroom and stormed into the first shower I saw. It was locked. I shook it for a second. When it actually sank in, and I realized it was locked, I moved to the next one. Slammed the door so hard that my head exploded. I turned the water on, as hot as it would go, until it burned my skin and my clothes stuck to my skin like a thousand leeches. I pulled out my braid, until my hair was falling across my face. Then I let myself drop to the floor of the shower, dirty and grimy as it was, and buried my face in my hands and sobbed. I tried to keep my voice down, tried hard because there were a lot of people on this hall, and somebody in the shower right next to me, but I was in pain. I’d had so much practice hiding things, quieting, down, but at that moment the sobs just spilled. I bit down on my hand to force myself to be quiet. Only then did I realize that through the other shower, I heard singing. Edith Piaf.

A few minutes, nothing more. I was under the hot water for only a few minutes, and my skin was turning bright red from the heat of the water. It hurt, but not nearly as badly as his hand on my cheeks.

That’s why I was confused, thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, when I saw red underneath the door of the other shower. I blinked back my tears for a single second, tried to clear my vision of its pained blurriness. There couldn’t actually be anything red over there. I got onto my hands and knees and crawled over, bent down like a cat, and looked closer.

“Fuck...Holy fuck.”

It was definitely red. The water in the other locked shower. It was red.  

I got to my feet and started banging.

“Hey! What’s going on in there?”

There was no response, and the singing had stopped. I nearly slipped on my way out of the shower, leaving the water on, as I went to the door of the other shower. The red water was spilling out from under the door, like a bloody tide.

“Open the door!” I cried. Getting hysterical. Banging on the door. Wanting to hear the rest of the song. “Hey! HEY!”

My fist was getting numb. I ran out toward my backpack—slipped, fell right onto my knees, dragged myself forward. Until I could reach my phone. Call 911. Then I kept banging on the door. Banging. Banging, until the first responders were pulling me away, kicking and screaming. They were cracking the door open, and then carrying her out, and I was screaming at them. They needed to save her, I screamed, they needed to save her, because whose voice was I going to hear in the shower, making my day just a bit brighter, and who was going to help me cover up these bruises if she was gone? Who was going to light up the entire bathroom, the entire hall? They had to save her, I cried at them, I cried, panicking. If you don’t save her, I won’t forgive you, you bastards, you have to fucking save her.

“We’ll do the best we can.”

 

* * *

 

Potya curled up in my lap as I sat in bed. Bruised. Afraid. Totally humiliated and utterly afraid. I reached for my phone and dialed the number and held it to my ear. It was the middle of the night, my room was dark, but I didn’t care.

“Hello?”

It wasn’t the voice I was expecting. And it was very clear.

“Yuuri,” I replied with a sigh. My body ached from the tears, and here they were, still coming.

“Yuri-chan. It’s the middle of the night. Is everything okay?”

“Really? You haven’t talked to me in weeks, and that’s the first thing you say?”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, it’s just...”

“I know. You’re having a rough time of it.”

“That’s no excuse. You’re my daughter.”

Something about that word made the tears flow harder. I clutched the phone and hugged Potya closer. I’d already told Beka. She’d spent the entire afternoon with me, calming me down, but had gone back to her room after dinner. We’d skipped.

“What’s wrong? Why are you up so late, calling us?”

“I...”

“Sweetheart, are you crying?”

“Maybe.”

“Come on. Tell me what’s the matter.”

“One of my teachers, he—he—”

“Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath, and talk slow.”

“Do you think you guys could come visit a little earlier?”

“Whatever you need. What’s this about?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Do you think that because I’ve hurt people, like how I punched that guy. Do you think that means I deserve to be hurt, too?”

Pause.

“Absolutely not. Who hurt you, Yuri-chan?”

“I really miss you,” I blubbered. And then I was sobbing into the phone and hearing Edith Piaf echoing in the torture chamber of my brain.


	20. 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter!! 
> 
> Thank you to all of you for reading my story--I know it's not my most popular, but it's close to my heart. It was a really exciting writing exercise and just what I needed. I hope that the passion and love I put into writing it translated when you read it. Currently experiencing a bit of a writer's block...but hopefully I'll be back with more stuff soon! If you liked this, go check out my other work <3 
> 
> love forever and always 
> 
> xoxo

**20**

JJ came back after a week. Bandages covered her arms, and her face was pale and sunken, her hair lacking its luster. And still, she was so beautiful. I was on my way to the bathroom when I bumped into her, walking back to her room from the hospital in sweatpants and a t-shirt. She froze when she saw me, and I froze, too. When we locked eyes, it blew my mind that she was the first one to smile.

“You have new bruises. On both cheeks now,” she said. I gawked. Her eyelashes fluttered like a million butterflies. “Need help covering that up? I owe you, after all.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

She shrugged, and beckoned for me to follow her, cracked fingertips and all.

“Thanks anyway. Come on. You look like a mess.”

The makeup looked breathtaking in the end—I felt like a supermodel. Not nearly as beautiful as her, though. Not nearly.

“You’ve been wearing more makeup lately, Yuri,” Lilia said.

“Just trying something new.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, right, Yuri?” She raised her eyebrows at me, and it took everything I had to say, “No, Lilia. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

 

* * *

 

Beka took me to Michelina’s diner the day after it happened. Bought me a huge milkshake, held my hands across the counter while I held back my tears. Michelina gave me a free slice of pie. Maybe she saw the bruises, shimmering like gems, under the foundation I’d ungracefully caked on.

“You know you’re amazing, Yuri,” Beka said to me. I nodded, but she squeezed my hand, because she could tell by looking into my glassy eyes that I didn’t really believe it.

“Can I tell you how you’ve changed my life?” she continued. I could offer her nothing but a shrug. Despite the fact that I wanted desperately for her to tell me how I’d changed her life.

“I had nobody here, really, until you. People were nice enough. But nobody understood me and nobody tried to. Not until little tsarina.”

She reached up and wiped one of my tears. I smiled, picking at my pie. Apple.

“When I saw you running in the courtyard, there was something in your eyes. Like you didn’t have anybody who understood you, either. I felt like we were the same. So I helped you out.”

“Selfish bitch,” I teased.

“Maybe. But the first night that we spent talking, really late into the night, in my room—do you remember? We didn’t really know each other that well, and you’d come over to listen to music. We ended up falling into some really deep conversations.”

“Yeah. I remember.”

“Part of me was so excited to hear your experiences. I wanted to listen to every word, because you deserved to be heard. And you told me so many things. Amazing things, terrible things, beautiful things. I couldn’t get enough of hearing you, seeing your smile, because it was so rare to see. I guess part of it was selfish, because I liked to think that I was one of the only people who could make you smile. Your eyes light up in a really special way when you talk about certain things. Cats. Pirozhkis. Yuuri and Victoria. Fucking with authority figures.”

I snorted, and she snorted with me, and we made gross sounds with our milkshake straws.         

        “But then you listened to me, too. You asked me to talk to you. You heard me say things that I’d never said to anybody. Like how I knifed the teacher who tried to rape me. How, when I was fifteen, I smoked three packs a day. Stupid little secrets about my life that I’d never even considered telling anybody. Your eyes sparkled, too, when you listened.”

“Beka...”

“I’m serious. I feel like I have somewhere to go, someone to tell about my day. You know? It seems so simple, but it changes everything.”

My arms were desperate to hold her, so despite my pain, despite my body and soul crumbling, I got out of the booth, scooted over to her side, and we hugged. We hugged hard. Then I put my legs in her lap, my head against her shoulder, covering her jacket in cheap CVS foundation, and we finished the milkshake. Everything she had said to me, every breath, every glisten of her dark, beautiful eyes, had lifted me up. Now I was afraid of falling, but somehow, I knew her arms, Victoria’s arms, Yuuri’s arms—and now Lilia’s arms, too—would be there to catch me. Maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible to let myself fall. I loved Beka. I loved Victoria, Yuuri, Lilia, Potya, I loved them with every bit of my terrible, shriveled up heart. I loved JJ, too. I was afraid for her, but thankful that she had shown me just what I stood to lose. I loved Phichit, I loved Seung-ah, I loved Guanghong and Lea. But mostly I loved Beka. Yuuri. Victoria.

“I love you,” I said in between sips. Beka kissed my cheek, as if trying to dissipate my bruise on the feathers of her lips.

“I love you, too, tsarina.”

 

* * *

 

Yuuri had told me that she and Victoria would try to change their airplane tickets to make it here earlier, upon my request. But they had never really gotten back to me. Every time I asked, they said they were still trying.

So I was shocked, amazed, bewildered, when in the middle of a class with him (where I’d learned to keep my head down and answer all his questions promptly), the door was thrown open to reveal Victoria. Standing in a thick fur coat, silver hair piled like ribbons atop her head, pointed manicured nails covered in slick black leather gloves. She opened the door forcefully, then pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. She was a supermodel stepping off a private jet, confidence dripping from her every muscle. When she walked inside, her heels clicked on the ground like chimes of a clock tower, making everyone sit up straighter.

“Victoria?!” I heard myself scream.

“Sit down and let mommy handle this, Yurotchka,” she said, without even looking over at me and without stopping. Walking straight over to where the teacher stood in front of the chalkboard. As she walked, she lifted her right hand and took off her glove. The girl who sat next to me turned to me.

“ _That’s_ your mom?”

I could do nothing but stare as Victoria stepped up right in front of him, glove fully off.

“I beg your pardon, but I’m in the middle of cla—”

His voice cut off like a broken record when Victoria slapped him across the face. He looked like a scolded dog, small, hand to his red cheek. Satisfaction and pride pulsed through me. But Victoria didn’t stop there. Not that I ever expected her to.

“If you _ever_ touch my daughter again, I will make sure that you never see the light of the day. You will rot in prison for the rest of your miserable life. Do you hear me?”

For the first time, I felt consciously happy that her accent was so damn Russian. The teacher wouldn’t look her in the eyes, so she reached up, cupped his chin, and forced him to face her. She spit in his face the way I had dreamt of doing. A few of the students gasped, some laughed. Hushed murmurs filled the room.

“You look me in the eyes, [подонок](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA).” She was taller than him, and stronger than him. “What, does hurting little girls make you feel better about yourself? I can have your head offered to me on a silver platter as soon as I say the word. You lay a hand on my daughter, or on anybody else, and the Bratva will look like children compared to me.”

She held his gaze for a few more moments, then let go and finally turned to face me. 

“[Пошли, Юрочка](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%BB%D0%B8%2C%20%D0%AE%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BA%D0%B0).”

“But I’m still in class.”

“[ **Я сказал,** **пошли.**](https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/%D0%AF%20%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BB%2C%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%BB%D0%B8.) ” 

Her hand reached toward me, and spanned oceans to get to me. I stood, gathered my things, and jumped to grab it. She squeezed my fingers and pulled me out of that hellhole, but as we left, they cheered. For me, or for Victoria, or because _fuck_ that asshole, it didn’t matter. When we were out in the hallway, she pulled me against her, smothered me against her thick fur jacket, until I couldn’t breathe. Her hands in my hair, on my back, her lips on the top of my head, it was everything to me. I was small, a baby, bright-eyed and red-cheeked and fragile, in her strong, protective, taloned arms.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I sobbed.

“Shh. It’s all right. I won’t let anybody touch you.”

She crouched until we were eye-level and held my face in her hands. One with a glove on, smooth, not a single callous, and one without a glove, slightly more rough, smelling of cherry almond moisturizer.

“This is not your fault, Yurotchka. And I will never forgive you if you continue to think that it is.”

I nodded, again and again and again while she wiped my tears and kissed my forehead.

“Did you mean what you said in there?”

“About making his life hell? Of course.”

“No, I mean...all that about me being your daughter.”

“Yuri. Of course. Yuuri and I will always love you as our daughter.”

“Why are you so nice to me? All I’ve ever done is hurt you.”

“Come here.”

She held me again, and then affection arrested her. She kissed me over and over and over, until my face was covered in her lipstick and I was tickled and couldn’t help but scrunch my nose up in ecstatic, hysterical laughter.

“You are so, so wrong. You get angry, you snap, you lash out, you like to insult people. But you have never hurt us the way you think you have. We all have our issues. I forget my promises and snap sometimes, like you.”

“Yuuri drinks like a sailor.”

A smile, bitter and cynical, wrinkled her face.

“Yuuri drinks like a sailor,” she repeated.

“Where is she? Is she with you? Did she come?”

“Yes, yes, sweet girl, calm down. She’s in Yakov’s office.”

“Can we go see her?”

She tossed her head back and laughed with true delight.  

“I wasn’t aware you were so attached to my beautiful wife.”

“Shut up. Don’t make me say it.”

I wrapped my arms around her neck again.

“I love you, Yurotchka.”

“Guess I love you, too.”

“Wow! A confession! Say it again. Let me record it.”

“Don’t push your luck, **баба.** ”

“Yes, darling. Let’s go find Yuuri, all right?”

“All right.”

 

* * *

 

Yuuri was put together, hair straight and nice, makeup perfect and natural, while she spoke to Yakov. We walked in while they were speaking, Yakov with a very strict and attentive look on his face. Victoria walked in, exchanged kisses with Yakov in greeting, sat down beside Yuuri. I sat on her other side, and she reached over and grabbed by hand.

“How are you doing, Yuri-chan?” she asked. That genuine, stupidly kind tinge in her voice. Her thumb ran along the back of my hand.

“I’m okay.”

“Yakov was just telling me about how little control he has, and how frustrated he is,” she continued.

“I’m technically the principal, but we’re a government-run institution. That’s what the reform part of reform school means. All of our teaching staff is screened and assigned by the federal government. I have almost no control over who gets employed. I’ve sent complaints in the past, but rarely is anything done.”

“Then try harder this time,” Victoria said through her sugar-sweet smile. “We won’t allow our daughter to stay in a school where she’s being physically abused.”

“Vitya, I know how frustrated you must be. And I agree. It is absolutely unacceptable.”

“Please. Is there anything else we can do to protect her? If what you say is true,” Yuuri interjected, “the higher ups might not even get to her case.”

“They always put us on the backburner. It’s hard for them to bring themselves to care about who they believe are adolescent delinquents. They send them here, but they don’t actually believe that these girls can be helped. They think they’ll all end up in jail eventually, anyway,” Yakov explained, in his gruff, angry voice.

“You can’t convince me that you sit here and do nothing,” Victoria said. “You’re not that kind of man.”

“I never said that. It’s why I’ve privately employed individual counselors, like Lilia. They do the work the government-employed teachers can’t.”

I thought about Lilia, and how she taught me how to braid my hair. She was a masterpiece if I’d ever seen one.

“What now?” I heard myself ask. Yakov leaned forward on his desk and looked me in the eyes, spoke to me like an adult.

“If you feel unsafe, we can transfer you to another school.”

“No,” I said without hesitation. Yuuri and Victoria both whirled to face me.

“Yuri-chan, that was a very quick response.”

“If I have to be in one of these schools anyway, I want it to be this one.”

“They’re hurting you here.”

“Okay. Do you think that with someone like Yakov in charge, this place is worse than anywhere else? Can you imagine what they do in other places?” I said.

“She has a point,” Yakov added.

“We do have connections here, Victoria. If we move her, we’d risk putting her in an even more dangerous situation.”

“Fine. But I want something done,” Victoria said, pursing her lips. She stood up. “Now, Yakov. Please.”

“I’m doing everything I can. I’ll make the calls, and I’ll at least suspend the teacher for as long as I can.”

“Good. We’re counting on you.”

Yuuri and I stood up, we thanked Yakov, and left. Only once we were outside did Yuuri hug me, tight, and I smelled lavender, pencil shavings, not even a little bit of alcohol. She kept on apologizing. Saying she should’ve been there for me. She shouldn’t have been drinking herself sick for weeks—all I could do was think about you, alone here, I felt so afraid and worried. She should’ve sobered up and answered the phone when I called, she said, should’ve shown her face. I looked at her, smiled, and told her that I forgave her. Told her that I loved her. Told her that I had lots of new music for her to listen to.

“I can’t wait to hear it all,” she said. Behind her glasses was delight and affection and musicality.

“Do you guys want to meet my counselor, Lilia?”

“She the one who taught you how to do this gorgeous braid?” Victoria asked. We began walked down the corridor, I between the two of them, while they had their arms on my shoulders. I was surrounded and smothered by them.

“Yeah.”

“We would love to meet her.”

“She’s kind of scary, but you get used to it.”

“You need scary. Otherwise nothing will change.”

“Shut up, Victoria.”

Yuuri laughed. They kissed my head. I was happy.

“And you’ll love my cat.”

“Your cat?”

“Her name is Potya.”

“What a pretty name.”

 

* * *

 

“Well, we obviously have to do something for your birthday,” Phichit said at dinner on the day of my birthday. A Wednesday.

“Guys, it’s fine. I don’t want to do anything.”

“But your parents didn’t get to stay,” Lea said. “Didn’t you say they were supposed to celebrate with you?”

“I mean, yeah, but things came up and they had to come early.”

“So. That means we have to do something.”

Beka, quiet, smiling, handed me a piece of bubblegum. I grinned at her fleetingly and took it. Victoria and Yuuri had loved her and thanked her for taking care of me. She had agreed with me that Victoria was the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen, and that Yuuri’s laugh and soul were made of music.

“How? They lock this place up like a prison.”

“What if we don’t do it here?” Guanghong suggested. We all looked at her, confused.

“Oh yeah! The haunted servant house,” Lea said.

“Not actually haunted, Lea.”

“Right, yeah. But that’s not a bad idea. Nobody goes in there. And if we get enough people to come...”

“Nobody’s gonna say no to Tsarina Bubblegum,” Seung-ah said.

I was taken back, surprised at her voice, directed at me, smooth and lovely. Astonished, I turned to her, in the middle of blowing a bubble. Her eyes hadn’t even flickered up from her book for a single moment. It was as if she had never said anything at all. Under the table, Phichit’s hand was probably on her thigh. Their shoulders brushed.

“Seung-ah’s right. Let’s go right before lights out. Lea, make a Facebook event and invite everyone,” Phichit ordered.

“On it.”

Beka nudged me and my body swayed with the grace and power of a tidal wave.

Just before the party, while Beka waited in my room, I scurried down the hall to JJ’s room. I was wearing my school uniform—just to make a statement. On my tiptoes, filled to the brim with affection, I knocked on her door. When she opened I jumped back, startled by her bright orange face mask.

“Yuri. It’s almost lights out.”

“Didn’t you get Lea’s Facebook invitation?”

“Sure. But I’m kind of...tired,” she smiled. Genuine.

“Well, remember how you said you owed me?”

“I’ve done your makeup every day for like a week, hun.”

“I want another favor.”

“Come on, I really don’t—”

“Will you come to my party and sing me a song? Please?”

I had stolen any protest from her lips.

“You want me to sing for you?”

“You do it in the shower all the time. But I want you to sing just for me. Just not happy birthday. Something better.”

“Yuri, are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well. I suppose I can’t refuse such a cute face,” she grinned. “I’ll meet you there, all right?”

“All right. I’ll punch you in the face if you don’t show up, okay?”

“Then we’ll have matching bruises.”

I stuck my tongue out at her, and was giddy to hear her voice pouring out in rainbow waterfalls just for me.    

By the time we got to the house at the edge of the parking lot, Phichit had already decorated it with streamers and lights he’d gotten god-knows-where, and it was packed. Everybody whooped, hollered, when I walked in, met with the stench of booze and weed and happiness. Music was blasting and lights flashed like we were at a rave. A few girls were making out in the corners, and a dance floor had emerged with Lea and Guanghong at the helm.

“Tsarina Bubblegum has arrived!” somebody cried. The haunted house shook. We were going to be found out soon, with how loud we were being, but nobody cared. We were here together, breaking rules, rebelling, being who we were and casting aside the labels everybody had placed on our foreheads and backs and hearts, together. Before I could comprehend what was happening enough to even cry my stupid happy tears, Beka and another girl lifted me up into the air like I was some sort of hero. JJ showed up about a minute later, dressed in a formal, very extra sparkling gown. It left the bandages on her arms shining up, beacons of survival and strength. Her hair fell in waves over her bare shoulder and everybody separated to let her stand on the rickety ledge at the end of what we assumed had once been the main living room of the haunted house.

She looked at me, dedicated the song to me, and sang “Non, je ne regrette rien,” for me. Everyone was starstuck, swaying, and Beka held me from behind and kissed my tears. I couldn’t stop smiling, not even when the corners of my lips and cheeks began to ache. I stared up into her blue eyes while she sang. Just for me. While I was surrounded with people there just to help me have a good sixteenth birthday. I’d never imagined anything like this.  

When she had finished, the rave music came back on, and the dance floor exploded into activity. Beka passed me a joint and a red solo cup, but I declined the booze. I smoked, and Beka undid my French braid.

“Shake it,” she said. I shook my head until my hair was wild and long and free and all of it smelled like weed. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the dance floor, and we danced, hand-in-hand, uncoordinated and unrestrained, limbs everywhere. The world swirled in bright, neon, beautiful colors to fit with my dancing, and suddenly everyone was begging the tsarina to dance for them. I found myself hoisted up, and I danced. Whipped my hair, spun around until I was afraid to fall, stomped to the beat and shook my ass as well as a little white girl could. I couldn’t see very well through my curtains of sunlight hair, getting caught in my bared, smiling teeth, and I didn’t know what song was playing, but it didn’t matter. I was high. I was dancing. My hair was loose. I somehow fit into this world—I could get high and dance and let my hair loose and still fit somehow into this world.  

In the crowd below me, watching me dance, cheering me on, I caught JJ’s eyes. Thankful, quietly loving. I caught Phichit’s eyes. Wanting only the best for everyone around him. And I caught Beka’s eyes. Loving me, supporting me, believing in my abilities to let my hair down and dance. The one who’d loved me through everything, who’d convinced me to believe that I could change and try loving in return. I beckoned for her to come up and dance with me. But she shook her head.

“It’s your day, Yuri!” she called up at me. “Dance like it’s the end of the world!”

So I danced like it was the end of the world.


End file.
